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 to the use and benefit of the public—a possibility that the Patent Act expressly recognizes, but the Copyright Act presently does not.

I.
Copyrights imperfectly resemble property. Like property, the various rights comprised in a copyright may be conveyed, separately or together, from one owner to another. Unlike transfers involving other forms of both tangible and intellectual property, however, all transfers or licenses of copyright interests by a work’s author are revocable. They may be terminated, during a defined period, at the sole election of the author or the author’s statutory heirs. Further strengthening authorial control, the Copyright Act expressly makes the author’s unilateral power to rescind the transfer irrevocable and nonwaiveable. Thus, copyright rights differ, in a fundamental way, from any other form of property: their initial ownership cannot voluntarily be permanently and unconditionally divested.

According to the legislative history, Congress intended the statutory provisions allowing termination of transfers to protect authors of expressive works from overreaching by powerful licensees, who may effectively pressure authors to make transfers on unremunerative terms. To be sure, examples of such overreaching are not difficult to locate in the cases construing the termination provisions. As between authors and publishers, the latter frequently enjoy superior bargaining power. Importantly, however, although redressing unremunerative bargains and preventing overreaching by licensees supply the underlying rationale for the termination rules, the statute expressly makes all copyright licenses or transfers by the author terminable without regard to the details of the parties’ bargain. The statute’s termination provisions may pose an underappreciated risk to a wide variety of contemporary “open content” projects, which depend