{"id":1045,"date":"2024-05-29T18:17:51","date_gmt":"2024-05-29T18:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/cher-wins-lawsuit-against-sonny-bonos-widow-over-royalties\/"},"modified":"2024-06-02T17:32:24","modified_gmt":"2024-06-02T17:32:24","slug":"cher-wins-lawsuit-against-sonny-bonos-widow-over-royalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/cher-wins-lawsuit-against-sonny-bonos-widow-over-royalties\/","title":{"rendered":"Cher Wins Lawsuit Against Sonny Bono\u2019s Widow Over Royalties"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tCher has won her lawsuit against Sonny Bono\u2019s widow over royalties to \u201cI Got You Babe\u201d and other hits after a federal judge ruled that Mary Bono must continue paying the superstar her cut under the couple\u2019s decades-old divorce settlement.<\/p>\n

\n\tMore than 20 years after Sonny\u2019s death, Mary argued that she no longer needed to pay royalties to Cher thanks to copyright law\u2019s so-called termination right \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a decision issued Wednesday (May 29), Judge John A. Kronstadt<\/strong> ruled that the federal termination rules do not trump Sonny and Cher\u2019s 1978 divorce settlement, which gave the singer a permanent 50% cut of the publishing revenue from songs written before the couple split up.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe ruling means that Cher will continue to receive publishing royalties for her catalog of songs created with Sonny, including \u201cThe Beat Goes On\u201d and \u201cBaby Don\u2019t Go.\u201d According to Wednesday\u2019s ruling, more than $400,000 in royalties owed to Cher have piled up since the dispute began.<\/p>\n

\n\tNeither side\u2019s attorneys immediately returned requests for comment.<\/p>\n

\n\tSonny and Cher started performing together in 1964 and married in 1967, rising to fame with major hits like \u201cI Got You Babe,\u201d \u201cThe Beat Goes On\u201d and \u201cBaby Don\u2019t Go.\u201d But the pair split up in 1974, finalizing their divorce with a settlement in 1978. Under that deal, Sonny retained ownership of their music rights, but Cher was granted a half-share of all publishing royalties in perpetuity.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat 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\u2019s copyrights from his publishers. And in 2021, they informed Cher that they would soon stop paying royalties under the earlier agreement.<\/p>\n

\n\tCher quickly sued, seeking a ruling that she was still owed her 50% cut regardless of who owns the copyrights since a federal copyright provision had no bearing on a state-law asset settlement. Mary fired back a few months later, claiming that termination rights could not be waived by contract and that Cher\u2019s arguments would \u201csubvert\u201d the purpose of the law.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Wednesday\u2019s ruling, Judge Kronstadt sided with Cher\u2019s arguments. He ruled that the divorce settlement with Sonny gave Cher a \u201ccontractual right to receive financial compensation,\u201d rather than the kind of control over his copyrights that could be voided using the termination right: \u201cA right to receive royalties is distinct from a grant of copyright,\u201d the judge wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cher has won her lawsuit against Sonny Bono\u2019s widow over royalties to \u201cI Got You Babe\u201d and other hits after a federal judge ruled that Mary Bono must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1472,1470,303,1219,1471,1473,882],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-bonos","tag-cher","tag-lawsuit","tag-royalties","tag-sonny","tag-widow","tag-wins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1142,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions\/1142"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}