Oh, the things you can find traipsing around the U. S. Copyright Office website…
I saw that there was a document recently filed (9/1/2020) with the Copyright Office regarding 16 Beach Boys songs from the late ’60s/early ’70s. The document (document number V9973D961) is described as a “Termination and release of security agreement.” I was curious was this meant and paid a $12 fee to the Copyright Office to receive copies of the associated documents. When I received them, I was initially disappointed that it didn’t involve anything earth-shattering—it looked like a bunch of legalese basically amounting to the fact that these 16 songs were part of a “security agreement” at some point in the early ’90s and that the parties involved wanted to confirm with the Copyright Office that the security agreement had expired as of September 16, 1997. As somebody not particularly legally-minded I wasn’t really sure what to make of that or why that was particularly relevant in 2020.
But then I looked over everything again and then I noticed this little nugget in the accompanying “Document Cover Sheet” (a standard questionnaire the Copyright Office provides that asks questions about who is filing the documents):
So, it appears that Mike has transferred his piece of the publishing rights for these 16 titles over to a company called Iconic Brothers, LLC. Digging around on the internet, it looks like this company was formed earlier this year. It is mentioned in the documents I received that a Olivier Chastan is one of the people involved with the company.
What are the 16 titles involved? They are as follows:
Interesting of course that Mike apparently owned publishing rights to some songs he didn’t write—but I think that might be explainable by the fact that these songs were all published by Brother Publishing Company. Perhaps each Beach Boy owned a share of all of the songs they published? (As an aside, I believe Brother Publishing acquired the publishing rights to “Bluebirds” at some point from whoever the previous publisher was.)
Is it possible that more than these just 16 songs were involved in the apparent transaction? I’d think yes—I believe the only reason these 16 songs are specifically commented on as being acquired is because of this “security agreement” that was in place over them in the 1990s. Perhaps there was some legal reason during negotiations that they had confirm that this old security agreement was no longer in force?
What’s also curious is that around the same time as these documents were filed, there was also another set of documents filed with the Copyright Office regarding “And your dreams come true & 314 other titles” (copyright record V9974D533), which I also paid the $12 to see. That batch of documents was filed by Universal Music Publishing though, so the Document Cover Sheet doesn’t mention any information about Iconic Brothers, LLC and there’s no way to know if they have any stake in that batch of songs. (Also questionable because that batch of songs seems to include tunes I don’t think Mike would have ever had any publishing rights to such as “Hully Gully” as one example.)
Anyways, I thought I might as well try to get some use out of the $24 I blew and share my findings here
Maybe others will find this interesting, maybe not…