Ninth Circuit says Supertramp singer must share royalties with ex-bandmates

LOS ANGELES (CN) — Former Supertramp frontman Roger Hodgson will need to split songwriting royalties with three former bandmates who didn’t write any of the songs, a Ninth Circuit panel ruled on Wednesday, reversing a jury’s 2024 decision siding with the singer.

The three-judge panel found that the federal court “erred in its judicial determination” when it said that a 1977 agreement splitting songwriting royalties between the band members and their manager could be unilaterally terminated after a “reasonable time.”

“Plaintiffs ask that defendants continue to ‘Give A Little Bit’ of Supertramp’s songwriting royalties until the band’s songs cease generating revenue. But, defendants believe that ‘From Now On,’ they are no longer obligated to share royalties because the publishing agreement was terminable after a reasonable time. We agree with plaintiffs,” U.S. Circuit Judge Kim Wardlaw wrote, referencing some of the British rock band’s hit songs.

While Wardlaw, a Bill Clinton appointee, and the panel agreed there was no express duration to the contract, they broke from the lower court on the determination that there was no implied duration, instead holding that a reasonable time could be implied: when the copyrighted work enters the public domain.

“At some point in the future, the copyrights in the works covered by the 1977 agreement will expire, and the works will fall into the public domain. At this point, the copyrights will cease to generate publishing royalties, and the obligations created by the 1977 agreement will terminate,” Wardlaw wrote on behalf of the panel.

The case was allowed to proceed to a jury only after a federal court ruled there was no implied end date. The eight-person jury took less than an hour to reach a unanimous verdict in February 2024 that Hodgson waited a reasonable amount before terminating the 1977 agreement.

But the panel said that it was understood for decades that the bandmembers would continue sharing publishing and songwriting royalties.

“Defendants paid Plaintiffs their contractual share of the publishing royalties for over forty years without any suggestion that they believed the 1977 agreement to be terminable at will … despite Hodgson’s purported belief that the 1977 agreement could be unilaterally terminated, neither he, [Rick] Davies, nor Delicate Music took the opportunity to do so until 2018,” Wardlaw wrote.

Prior to 2018, former Supertramp bass player Dougie Thomson, saxophonist John Helliwell and drummer Bob Siebenberg regularly received a $100,000 or more cut of the royalties each year from Hodgson and Rick Davies, the band’s founding members and main songwriters.

They sued Hodgson and Davies in 2021 for ending the agreement. Davies settled with them last year.

Hodgson, who left the band in 1983, claimed that the agreement was meant to be a temporary measure until the band had money coming in from record sales. However, the band members argued that the payments were meant to be in perpetuity.

In a statement, David Burg, who represented the band members, called the lower court’s ruling a “clear error.”

“We are extremely gratified that … the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has preserved our clients’ legacy for themselves and their heirs while restating common sense California law that will continue to govern similar matters going forward.”

Attorneys for the defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.

The panel was rounded out by U.S. Circuit Judge John Owens, a Barack Obama appointee, and U.S. District Judge Charles Hinderaker, a Donald Trump appointee, sitting by designation from the District of Arizona.

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