Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp.
Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. is a landmark 1948 New York Supreme Court decision that was the first case in United States copyright law to recognize moral rights in authorship.
The composers relied on several legal theories, most notably that they had moral rights in authorship preventing the misuse of their works in a manner that contradicted their beliefs.
The Iron Curtain, a spy film based on the 1945 defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Union to Canada, premiered on May 12, 1948, in New York City, to mostly positive reviews, modest box office returns, and the protests of left-wing organizations.
[6] The film's soundtrack was conducted by Alfred Newman and solely featured the works of several famous Soviet composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, and Nikolai Myaskovsky.
From 1947 to 1948, pro-Soviet organizations attempted to persuade Fox president Spyros Skouras and the Motion Picture Association of America to pull the film.
[18] In May 1948, before the film's release, the attorney Charles Recht—who had previously served as the Soviet Union's representative to the United States—filed suit against Fox on behalf of Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Prokofiev, and Myaskovsky.
[11][20][a] The law professor Mira T. Sundara Rajan has suggested that the composers were nominal plaintiffs and that the suit was brought at the behest of the Soviet government, which wanted to censor the film outright.
[11][20][28] They asserted four grounds for issuance of an injunction:[29][30][c] According to the law professor Justin Hughes, the privacy claim rested on a right to anonymity and the contention that use of the music constituted a public distortion of the composers' beliefs.
[31][c] Second, assuming that it had the authority to issue an injunction for libel under New York law, the court rejected the defamation claim because the composers had failed to prove that the use of their music implied that they supported the message of the film.
[9][41] According to documents from the Fox archives, one radio columnist said that "the studio couldn't have bought the kind of publicity the Reds handed out on a silver platter".
[6][43][44] Legal commentators have described the Shostakovich decision as a landmark case[1][2][3] that typifies the rejection of moral rights claims by United States courts.
The law professors Arthur Katz, in 1951, and Sidney Post Simpson and Bernard Schwartz, in 1948, criticized the court for failing to articulate a standard for evaluating moral rights and not recognizing that the composers had a valid claim that their works were being misappropriated to support a political stance that they disagreed with.
[48] Likewise, in 1955 William Strauss stated that the court correctly concluded that use of a public domain work does not imply support on behalf of its author and that composers should not be allowed to censor the use of their music based on their political views.
[49] Mira T. Sundara Rajan wrote in 2011 that the court properly weighed the interest in a free public domain against authors' moral rights.
