Although the author worked under the terms of a collective bargaining agreement when he penned the movie, the right to ownership was governed by copyright law and not labor law.
The writer of the screenplay for Friday the 13th, the classic summer camp thriller that spawned a generation of equally campy horror films, was entitled to reclaim ownership of the work, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled. The court’s ruling in favor of the writer put to rest, at least for now, an innovative argument that the existence of a collective bargaining agreement meant that labor law and not copyright law principles governed the ownership dispute (Horror Inc. v. Miller, September 30, 2021, Carney, S.).
Case date: 30 September 2021
Case number: No. 18-3123-cv
Court: United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
A full summary of this case has been published on Kluwer IP Law.
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