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Clause & Effect
Production Agreements/Motion Picture and Screenplay Rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that, under a 1939 agreement between RKO Radio Pictures and actor/director/screenwriter Orson Welles, the studio owned the copyright to the motion picture 'Citizen Kane' despite a subsequent agreement terminating the parties' relationship. But the appeals court remanded the case for a determination of whether the studio or Welles owned the right for home-video release of the movie years later, and whether Welles had a profit-participation right in the movie. Welles v. Turner Entertainment Co., 05-55742.
The production agreement stated in part:'[RKO] shall own the negative and positive prints of each of the Pictures and all rights of every kind and nature in and to each Picture, and all parts thereof and all material, tangible and intangible, used therein, as soon as such rights come into existence.' But the parties signed an exit agreement in 1944 ending their business relationship. The Ninth Circuit explained that the exit contract ' which contained no choice-of-law provision, so California law applied ' 'did not retroactively rescind RKO's copyright in the Citizen Kane motion picture unless RKO's copyright remained executory at the time of the Exit Agreement ' Under the parties' agreements, RKO had always owned the motion picture copyright, and it had no executory right in the motion picture to release at the time the parties signed the Exit Agreement.'
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