Shostakovich v. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp. is a landmark 1948 New York Supreme Court decision that is best known as the first case in United States copyright law to recognize moral rights in authorship. The Shostakovich case was brought following the United States premiere of The Iron Curtain, a 1948 spy film and the first anti-Soviet Hollywood film of the Cold War era. The film featured the music of several Soviet composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, and Nikolai Myaskovsky.
The composers—as nominal plaintiffs standing in for the Soviet government, according to some scholars—sued the film's distributor, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, in New York Supreme Court, the state's trial court. Conceding that their compositions were in the public domain under United States law, the composers sought an injunction prohibiting further distribution of the film. 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 court rejected the composers' arguments, holding that the standard for adjudicating moral rights was not settled law and that, in any event, moral rights conflict with the right of the public to use public domain works. The Soviet government continued to press the composers' moral rights case before the French courts, which ruled in their favor in Société Le Chant du Monde v. Société Fox Europe and Société Fox Americaine Twentieth Century.
Legal commenters have described the case as a landmark decision and noted that it is representative of United States' courts reactions to moral rights. The decision has been criticized as a misunderstanding of moral rights and praised for upholding the right of the public to use public domain works over the rights of authors to censor uses that they disagree with.
Background
The Iron Curtain, a spy film based on the defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Union to Canada, premiered on May 12, 1948, in New York City, to the protests of left-wing organizations, mostly positive reviews, and modest box office returns. The film, distributed by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, was the first Cold War production of the United States film industry.
The film's soundtrack was conducted by Alfred Newman and featured the works of several famous Soviet composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sergei Prokofiev, and Nikolai Myaskovsky. The soundtrack included excerpts from the third and fourth movements of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5; the first movement of his Symphony No. 6; the "Lullaby" from Khachaturian's Gayane; the third movements from Prokofiev's Symphonies Nos. 1 and 5; and Myaskovsky's .
The film used the composers' music in approximately 45 of the film's 87 minutes and showed a character placing one of the composers' records on a phonograph. The opening credits also contained the following statement: "Music from selected works of the Soviet Composers, Dmitry Shostakovich, Serge Prokofieff, Aram Katchaturian, Nicolai Miashovsky, conducted by Alfred Newman."