Second Circuit asked to weigh in on struggle over ‘Friday the 13th’ copyright
The director of the 1977 horror film “Friday the 13th” has asked the Second Circuit to overturn a district court ruling which stripped him of his rights to the film’s screenplay.
Victor Miller, author of the film’s screenplay, served three termination notices in 2016 seeking to reclaim copyright over the work from Sean Cunningham, the film’s director.
Cunningham subsequently sued in the US District Court for the District of Connecticut, seeking a declaration that Miller had written the screenplay as an employee of his production company, Manny Company, and subsequently did not own the copyright for the film.
Last September, the district court ruled that Victor Miller had written the “Friday the 13th” screenplay as an independent contractor, rather than as an employee of Manny.
Consequently, as Miller was not working for Manny, he was the sole owner of the resulting copyright, the district court ruled.
Horror Inc, Manny’s successor company, has now filed a bid to have that decision overturned at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
In court documents filed on Monday, June 3, the company argued that Miller was hired to write the screenplay as a member of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA).
As such, the terms of his employment were governed by the WGA collective bargaining agreement, to which Manny was a signatory, Horror Inc argued.
“That collective bargaining agreement makes clear that a screenwriter writing a screenplay for a WGA signatory is an employee,” the court filing said.
According to Cunningham, the district court’s ruling that Miller was not an employee for the purposes of writing “Friday the 13th” threaten to disrupt “long-settled relationships in the film industry and [undermine] the very benefits the WGA has so successfully negotiated for its members”.
Cunningham and Horror Inc also argued that, in any event, Miller’s claims to the copyright of the film were invalid under the Copyright Act’s three-year statute of limitations.
“Even if Miller acted as an independent contractor (he did not), any rights Miller held in the screenplay copyright were repudiated no later than 1980, meaning that his purported 2016 termination notices were long since untimely,” lawyers for the filmmaker said.
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