In 1962, The Beatles famously played a series of residencies at Hamburg’s Star-Club, the first few with original drummer Pete Best, subsequently replaced by Ringo Starr.1 Recordings of The Beatles’ 1962 performances at the Star-Club have apparently been floating around for decades, and Apple Corps, the vessel containing “all merchandising … and other intangible rights” of The Beatles has, perhaps understandably, been on a mission to stop commercial distribution of these recordings.
In the most recent development in the whack-a-mole saga of the Star-Club recordings, Apple Corps filed suit last week in the Southern District of Florida against Fuego Entertainment, which plans to release Star-Club tapes it acquired from the collection of one Jeffrey Collins. Here is the complaint. And here is Wired’s coverage.
Apple Corps alleges trademark infringement and dilution for the use of The Beatles’ registered stylized mark, violations of their likeness rights for the inclusion of photos of Ringo et al on the defendants’ website, and various unfair competition claims. More importantly, Apple Corps sues for common law copyright infringement and violation of the federal civil anti-bootlegging statute, 17 USC § 1101 .
As I’ve argued before, and perhaps most long-windedly here, 17 USC § 1101 and its criminal counterpart 18 USC § 2319A are constitutionally flawed. In short, these two statutes extend exclusive rights nearly identical to those conferred by copyright law to subject matter that is outside of the scope of Congress’ copyright authority. Moreover, the statutes confer those rights without imposing any durational limit. Live performances, because they are not Writings, aren’t the sort of thing copyright law recognizes as protectable. And even assuming they were, they cannot be protected perpetually.
The statutes are defended on the grounds that Congress has independent authority to legislate under the Commerce Clause and can do so free of any limits imposed by Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. So far this argument, as flawed as it is, has carried the day in the Courts of Appeals. Most recently, the Second Circuit bought this line in Martignon. But before Martignon, the Eleventh Circuit considered the constitutionality of the anti-bootlegging statutes in US v. Moghadam. There the court held that because extending copyright-like protection to non-Writings was not “fundamentally inconsistent” with the aims of Clause 8, the legislation could stand. Notably, the Eleventh Circuit explicitly refused to consider Moghadam’s argument, first raised on appeal, that the statute was unconstitutional because it lacked any durational limit. But the court did intimate on several occasions that it may well have found that argument more persuasive, if properly raised.
Now, I think the Eleventh Circuit’s fundamental inconsistency test was invented from whole cloth and lacks any obvious foundation. And I’m of the opinion that the court misapplied its own test by concluding that the Framers weren’t particularly concerned with limiting the scope of copyrightable subject matter to Writings. That said, Apple Corps v. Fuego, in the event it results in an opinion and appeal, might offer the Eleventh Circuit the chance to revisit these questions. At the very least, it would finally present the court with an opportunity to examine the durational question so invitingly left open in Moghadam.