Film and TV copyright rests on one structural idea that governs almost everything else: a motion picture is a single unitary audiovisual work, not a bundle of separate copyrights held by everyone who worked on it. The Copyright Act defines motion pictures as audiovisual works consisting of a series of related images that, when shown in succession, impart an impression of motion, together with any accompanying sounds. That definition treats the finished film as one thing.
Everything practical follows from that. Copyright in the film normally vests in one entity, the production company. The contributions of the director, cinematographer, actors, editors, and designers merge into the whole rather than surviving as freestanding property. Separate copyrights do exist around the film, in the novel it adapted, the screenplay, and the music on the soundtrack, but those are inputs licensed in, not slices of the film itself.
Courts have repeatedly declined to fragment a movie. In 16 Casa Duse, LLC v. Merkin, 791 F.3d 247 (2d Cir. 2015), a director claimed copyright in his directorial contribution to a short film. The Second Circuit rejected it, reasoning that filmmaking contributions of that kind are not independently copyrightable works and that a film has a dominant author, generally the party who exercises creative control and bears the enterprise. The court leaned on the joint-authorship analysis from Aalmuhammed v. Lee, 202 F.3d 1227 (9th Cir. 2000), where a consultant on Malcolm X who supplied substantial creative input was still not a co-author.
The Ninth Circuit went further in Garcia v. Google, Inc., 786 F.3d 733 (9th Cir. 2015) (en banc). An actress who had been deceived about the film she appeared in argued she held copyright in her own five-second performance. The en banc court dissolved the injunction and held she did not, warning that recognizing performance-level copyrights would make a film a “legal morass” of thousands of overlapping claims. The holding is not that performances lack creativity. It is that the statute fixes the work at the level of the film.
The practical effect is stability. A distributor can acquire one film from one owner instead of negotiating with every person whose creativity is visible on screen.
The doctrine that delivers single ownership is work made for hire under 17 U.S.C. § 201(b), which makes the employer or commissioning party the author for copyright purposes from the outset. There are two routes.
Note the gap. A screenplay written on spec by an outside writer is not commissioned, so it cannot be a work for hire on the second route; it has to be assigned instead. That distinction looks like paperwork trivia and turns out to matter decades later, because assignments can be terminated and works for hire cannot.
A film is a derivative work stacked on other people’s copyrights. Four layers recur:
Add life rights, still photographs, stock footage, clips from other films, trademarks visible on screen, and location releases, and you have the clearance file that a distributor’s errors-and-omissions insurer will audit before anyone writes a check.
Section 106(4) gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to perform an audiovisual work publicly. The definitional muscle sits in § 101’s transmit clause, which makes it a public performance to transmit a performance to the public “whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.”
Congress wrote that language in 1976 to overrule the cable cases, Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists (1968) and Teleprompter Corp. v. CBS (1974), which had held that retransmitting broadcast signals was not a performance at all. Alongside it Congress created the compulsory license in 17 U.S.C. § 111, letting cable systems retransmit broadcast signals by paying statutory royalties rather than negotiating with every rightsholder.
American Broadcasting Cos. v. Aereo, Inc., 573 U.S. 431 (2014), tested whether technical architecture could route around this. Aereo assigned each subscriber a tiny individual antenna and streamed a personal copy, arguing every transmission was private. The Supreme Court held 6 to 3 that Aereo performed publicly, because it was substantially similar to a cable system and behind-the-scenes engineering does not change what the viewer experiences. The lesson generalizes: the transmit clause looks at whether the public is being reached, not at how many discrete streams accomplish it.
A streaming service is not exercising one right. It is exercising several at once:
That is why a streaming agreement never says simply “performance rights.” It grants a bundle, defined by territory, term, exclusivity, and language, and it lives or dies on whether the underlying music and source-material licenses were drafted broadly enough to cover media that did not exist when they were signed. Older library titles frequently were not, which is the reason films disappear from services or reappear with different songs.
Sections 203 and 304(c) let authors and their heirs claw back grants on advance written notice, notwithstanding any contract to the contrary. The clocks differ: § 203 runs 35 years from execution of the grant, while § 304(c) runs 56 years from the date the copyright was originally secured. The waiver-proof design is deliberate: Congress wanted authors who sold cheaply before a work proved valuable to get a second bite.
For film, the doctrine is narrower than it looks. Section 203 expressly does not reach works made for hire, so the motion picture itself is usually untouchable. Termination lands on the underlying rights, the novelist’s grant or the spec screenwriter’s assignment. Even then, § 203(b)(1) preserves derivative works prepared under the grant before termination, so an existing film keeps running. What terminates is the right to make the next one: sequels, remakes, series adaptations. That is the fight worth watching on properties from the late 1970s and 1980s that are now hitting their windows.
Who owns the copyright in a film? Usually a single production company, not the contributors. A motion picture is a unitary audiovisual work under 17 U.S.C. § 101, and the people who shoot, act, edit, and design it normally sign work made for hire agreements or assignments, so their contributions vest in the producer. Courts have refused to slice a film into separate copyrights for each performance or department. In 16 Casa Duse v. Merkin the Second Circuit held a director had no independent copyright in his directorial contribution, and in Garcia v. Google the Ninth Circuit en banc rejected an actress’s claim to copyright in her own performance.
What are underlying rights in a film? Underlying rights are the separate copyrighted works a film incorporates but does not itself create. The main ones are the source material (a novel, article, play, or life-rights arrangement), the screenplay, the musical compositions used in the soundtrack, and the sound recordings of those compositions. Music requires two licenses, a synchronization license from the publisher for the composition and a master use license from the label for the recording. Clearing these is the core of chain of title.
Is streaming a public performance or a copy? In practice both. A stream is a public performance under 17 U.S.C. § 106(4) because the transmit clause in § 101 covers transmitting a work to the public whether or not people receive it in the same place or at the same time. ABC v. Aereo (2014) confirmed that thousands of individual one-to-one transmissions can still be a single public performance. A streaming service also reproduces the work when it encodes and caches files, and a download implicates the distribution right, so a normal streaming deal licenses reproduction, distribution, and public performance together.
Can film rights be terminated after they are granted? Sometimes, but rarely for the film itself. Section 203 lets an author or their heirs terminate a post-1977 grant during a five-year window opening 35 years after execution, with advance written notice, and § 304(c) does similar work for pre-1978 grants. The catch is that § 203 does not apply to works made for hire, so the film as a unitary work is usually immune. Terminations bite on the underlying rights instead, mainly novels and screenplays written by outside authors, and even then the derivative works exception lets a film already made under the grant keep being exploited.
Going further: Film and TV chain of title, step by step .
This page is general legal information, not legal advice, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
The Second Circuit held the Seinfeld Aptitude Test infringed: a show's fictional facts are protected expression, and repackaging them for fans is not fair use.
The Eighth Circuit held studio publicity posters entered the public domain, but merchandise that evokes the Wizard of Oz film characters still infringes.
In Yonay v. Paramount, the Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Paramount over 'Top Gun: Maverick,' holding that a film sharing a real Navy program with a 1983 magazine article copies facts, not protected expression.
Judge Posner held that a writer who only supplied a name and dialogue can be a joint copyright owner of a comic character, even though someone else drew it, when their contributions merge into one work.
Judge Posner held that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as drawn in the pre-1923 stories, are free for anyone to use, rejecting the estate's 'complex character' copyright theory.
The Ninth Circuit applied its Batmobile test to deny copyright in 'The Moodsters' and rejected the creator's idea-submission claim against Disney's Inside Out.
The Ninth Circuit held that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character, building a three-part test that now governs character protection for film and television.
