REVERSION
ALSO CALLED: RIGHTS REVERSION · TERMINATION RIGHT
DEFINITION
Reversion is the return of previously licensed or assigned rights to their original creator, either automatically after a fixed period specified in a contract or by exercising a statutory termination right. In the US, authors have a non-waivable statutory right to terminate most grants after 35 years regardless of what the contract says.
WHAT IT MEANS IN PRACTICE
Contractual reversion clauses are negotiated up front: a publisher's rights in a book might revert to the author if the book goes out of print for a set number of months, for instance. These clauses exist entirely at the discretion of whoever drafts the contract.
The US statutory termination right under Section 203 of the Copyright Act is different in kind. It applies to grants made after 1978, kicks in 35 years after the grant, and cannot be waived or contracted away in advance, even if the original agreement tries to say otherwise.
The EU has no single equivalent statutory right, though some member states have their own versions; German law, for example, has a 'right of remuneration adjustment' aimed at underpaid authors, but it works differently and does not simply hand rights back.
Musicians care about this more than most, since it is the mechanism by which recording artists can eventually reclaim masters signed away as young, unknown acts decades earlier.
AN EXAMPLE
A songwriter signed a publishing deal in 1988 assigning her compositions to a publisher. In 2023, 35 years later, she files a statutory termination notice and reclaims her share of the compositions, regardless of what the original 1988 contract said about the assignment being permanent.
WATCH OUT
Publishers sometimes describe grants as 'permanent and irrevocable' hoping the songwriter never learns that US law overrides that language after 35 years.
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