Sullivan & Worcester LLP -
Nicholas O'Donnell, Lexology; Au Revoir, Droit de Suite—9th Circuit Narrows California Resale Royalty Act to a Single Year’s Sales
[Kip Currier: A very savvy undergraduate student in a Pitt course for which I was guest lecturing on Patents and Trademarks earlier this month asked me about resale rights in the U.S.
Timely article on recent developments, given my lecture yesterday on International Intellectual Property, moral rights, and the U.S.'s Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 too.]
"The idea of moral rights continues to be a notable difference between
European and American intellectual property rights with respect to
visual arts. Last week’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in a case brought by artist Chuck Close and others addressing the California Resale Royalty Act
(the CRRA) underscores those distinctions. In holding that the CRRA is
mostly preempted by federal copyright law and thus can be applied to
entitle artists to secondary royalties only for sales of art in a single
calendar year—1977—the 9th Circuit affirmed the skepticism with which
American law continues to regard anything other than classic copyright.
Given the failure of efforts to pass national legislation to provide for
resale royalties, this decision is probably the end of the line for the
foreseeable future in the U.S. for droit de suite, the term of art used to describe the concept."
