Cher attends The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Opening Gala at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on September 25, 2021 in Los Angeles, California.has won her lawsuit against Sonny Bono’s widow over royalties to “I Got You Babe” and other hits after a federal judge ruled that Mary Bono must continue paying the superstar her cut under the couple’s decades-old divorce settlement.
More than 20 years after Sonny’s death, Mary argued that she no longer needed to pay royalties to Cher thanks to copyright law’s so-called termination right — a provision of federal law that allows songwriters and their heirs to win back control of their intellectual property rights decades after they gave them away.John A. Kronstadt
ruled that the federal termination rules do not trump Sonny and Cher’s 1978 divorce settlement, which gave the singer a permanent 50% cut of the publishing revenue from songs written before the couple split up.The ruling means that Cher will continue to receive publishing royalties for her catalog of songs created with Sonny, including “The Beat Goes On” and “Baby Don’t Go.” According to Wednesday’s ruling, more than $400,000 in royalties owed to Cher have piled up since the dispute began.
That agreement stayed in effect for years, including after Bono died in a 1998 skiing accident. But in 2016, Mary and other heirs invoked the termination right, seeking to take back control of Sonny’s copyrights from his publishers. And in 2021, they informed Cher that they would soon stop paying royalties under the earlier agreement.
In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Kronstadt sided with Cher’s arguments. He ruled that the divorce settlement with Sonny gave Cher a “contractual right to receive financial compensation,” rather than the kind of control over his copyrights that could be voided using the termination right: “A right to receive royalties is distinct from a grant of copyright,” the judge wrote.
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