The doctrine of indivisibility (or indivisibility doctrine) was a

legal doctrine A legal doctrine is a framework, set of rules, Procedural law, procedural steps, or Test (law), test, often established through precedent in the common law, through which judgments can be determined in a given legal case. For example, a doctrine ...

United States copyright law The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly A monopoly (from Greek language, Greek and ) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack ...

, which held that a

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

was a single, indivisible right that its owner could only assign as a whole. The doctrine was founded upon the policy concern that a

defendant In court proceedings, a defendant is a person or object who is the party either accused of committing a crime in criminal prosecution or against whom some type of civil relief is being sought in a civil case. Terminology varies from one juris ...

alleged to have infringed a single work might find himself facing claims from multiple

plaintiff A plaintiff ( Π in legal shorthand) is the party who initiates a lawsuit (also known as an ''action'') before a court. By doing so, the plaintiff seeks a legal remedy. If this search is successful, the court will issue judgment in favor of the ...

s, all claiming copyright in that same work. Despite the indivisibility doctrine, a copyright holder could still effectively assign certain rights. The assignees of those rights were held to be "mere licensees." This doctrine could yield a harsh result for an exclusive licensee in a work. If a third party infringed the work, the copyright holder had no motivation to file suit---the work was no longer marketable. So courts allowed exclusive licensees to compulsively join the copyright holder as a plaintiff in such suits. Non-exclusive licensees could not forcefully join copyright holders, on the theory that in those cases, the work was still marketable and the copyright holder therefore had an interest in protecting his rights. The doctrine could also yield a harsh result where a magazine purchased the right of first publication from an author, but provided a copyright notice only for the magazine as a whole, not for the author. This would result in a forfeiture of any copyright protection and an injection of the work into the public domain. As detailed below, this harsh result was mostly abrogated by ''Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc.'' In the case '' Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc.'', 425 F.2d 397, the

United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in case citations, 2d Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory covers the states of Connecticut, New York (state), New York, and Vermont, and it has ap ...

held that the doctrine of indivisibility could not operate to wholly deprive an author of his copyright when a "mere licensee" secured a copyright in a

collective work A collective work is a work that contains the works of several authors assembled and published under the direction of one natural or legal person who owns the copyright in the work as a whole. Definitions vary considerably from one country to ...

but the author never secured a separate copyright on his own. The doctrine of indivisibility was expressly eliminated in the

Copyright Act of 1976 The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, ...

. Assignees of rights in a copyrighted work now have standing to directly file suit against infringers. Because adequacy of a copyright notice is examined under the statue as it existed on the date that the work was first published, the doctrine of indivisibility remains potentially relevant for works published before January 1, 1978.37 C.F.R. § 202.2(a)(1)

References

United States copyright law Legal doctrines and principles {{US-law-stub

See also

References