Santa Claus is goin’ to court as family sue for rights to famous song

But a legal feud over the rights to the song Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town have left the music company EMI pouting, after the composer’s descendants served it with a lawsuit to try to win back the publishing rights.

The daughter and three grand-daughters of the late J Fred Coots, who wrote the music in 1934, are challenging EMI for control of the work, which has been covered over the years by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby to Bruce Springsteen, Dolly Parton, Justin Bieber and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

At stake are millions of dollars in revenue that currently go to EMI when it licenses the song to other artists.

Composed in 1934, it is one of the music industry’s most prolifically recorded Christmas works. “It’s one of the top grossing singles every year … you’ve only got to turn on the radio and there it is,” said Mr Coots’s grand-daughter, Patti Bergdahl, 57, who is suing EMI in a court in Miami, along with her sister, her cousin and her aunt.

“The artist who creates a work should be the one to benefit – the artist and their heirs – not a company like EMI. But EMI have come back and said pretty much ‘stick it in your hat’, for want of a better phrase, and that they’re going to give us a fight.”

Now it will be down to a federal judge to determine whether EMI has been naughty or nice in the way it has handled the issue.

The dispute is legally complicated, but centres on documents filed with the United States Copyright Office on the family’s behalf in 2004, which Mrs Bergdahl says terminated EMI’s interests in the song five years later. Publishing revenue since 2009 has therefore been “improperly retained” by EMI and belongs to the family, their suit states.

EMI is challenging the claim, maintaining that it struck a deal with Mr Coots’s descendants in 1981, that the family has no further right to alter or challenge.

“Their claims are baseless and EMI fully expects that they will be dismissed,” the company said in a statement.

The case is likely to be part of a wider shake-up of the music industry that has been dubbed “Termageddon”, as legislation created in 1978 – which allows artists who have recorded albums since that date to demand the termination of record companies’ control of it 35 years later – begins to kick in.

Mrs Bergdahl said: “Our case is going to benefit not just our families but a lot of other artists.”

She is doing it, she said, to protect her grandfather’s legacy. “It’s important because if you get the publishing rights back, that stays with the family pretty much forever. But writers’ royalties die with the writer’s grand- children.”

Mr Coots, who wrote more than 700 songs, died in 1985. “It’s fine with us that there have been so many different versions – it helps to bring it to a younger generation for sure,” Mrs Bergdahl said. “There’s not a single one I’ve not liked. Even Justin Bieber.”