No money for the creator of the famous “Tatort“ opening scene.

For decades  Germans have been watching "Tatort" (in English "Crime Scene") on Sunday evenings. It is a famous crime series in which each episode shows a different crime movie of about 90 minutes. „Tatort“ is created by several different directors, and every one of them has created his own detective with his own personal work and lifestyle in one of Germany’s cities (similar to the much younger US series "CSI").  The „Tatort“ series has brought forward the talent of many directors and the G erman audience loved the various detectives and with which the different actors were associated with. Fact is, that  „Tatort“ has entertained many generations in Germany - watching detectives appearing, aging and retiring with the years. One specific aspect though never changed in all those years: The opening scene. A tension creating film sequence where one can see running feet on wet asphalt in the dark, and then the circles of a target mark appear that in the end form the letter “o” of the word “Tatort” which means "crime scene".  It has been shown more than 30.000 times over the past decades. The music that is featured in this sequence is probably more well-known to the Germans than the national anthem. A real cult. Roughly 40 years ago when the opening scene was created the creator had earned a fee of what nowadays would be an approx. equivalent of EUR 1.300. Considering the huge success of the “Tatort”-series, she now claimed an additional fee  from the respective public television channels based on § 32 a of the German Copyright Act (GCA). In fact  § 32 a GCA, the so called “Bestseller Rule” and one of the most controversially discussed provisions in German Copyright Act, grants an additional compensation in case that there is a remarkable misbalance between the revenues of the work and the compensation that has been paid to the creator, even many years later, even in case that the amount of the revenues or the success of the work was not foreseeable. While the Regional Court in Munich I in an unexpected and surprising decision had granted the requested fee, the Court of Appeal now revoked that decision for the following reasons: §32 a GCA  grants an additional fee only, if the contribution of the creator was not of subordinate importance for the work as a whole. However, the opening sequence of a movie has never been considered a separate work of its own, but, has rather always been treated like an advertising jingle or teaser. It only has the purpose of labeling the program iself. The fact that the opening scene of “Tatort” was very well-known to the German television audience, was only due to the fact that it had been repeated for over 40 years, but according to the Court of Appeal this does not mean that it had a particular importance for the program. Therefore, the television channel did not have any additional advantage from that sequence, but, the viewers were watching because they wanted to watch the following crime story. Nevertheless, the creator did win the proceeding  partly as far as the court had ordered the television channels to omit sustaining that the opening scene was created by one off their employees as this was incorrect and therefore violated the rights of the creator as the sole and true copyright holder. (Decision of the Court of Appeal, Munich in Case No. 29 U 2749/10 on 10 February 2011)   Copyright protection in Germany shows a bundle of significant differences to copyright laws in other countries around the world. In case of questions, please contact Barbara Niemann Fadani, the author and creator of this article and one of the copyright experts and lawyers at LexDellmeier.