To misquote Oscar Wilde, to lose one attempt to control your publishing may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a second looks like carelessness. This, however, is the prism through which to understand the move by Paul McCartney – which started in December last year but has only recently been made public – to take control of his composition rights during his time in the Beatles.

In brief, under the US Copyright Act of 1976, writers can move to recapture the publishers’ share of songs they wrote before 1978. Their claim must be filed with the US copyright office between two and 10 years before a 56-year period (or, more precisely, two consecutive 28-year terms; if the songwriter has died, their estate can make a claim for the rights after the first 28-year term) elapses. McCartney’s initial filing covers 32 songs, but not all are from the early days of the Beatles, which would start to become available in chronological order. Among the songs named are several from the Abbey Road album, released in the band’s dying days in 1969.



Context is all. As revealed in face-clasping detail in Peter Doggett’s forensic analysis of their injudicious business deals in You Never Give Me Your Money, the Beatles signed a string of abysmal contracts that monumentally undervalued their worth and that today have still not been properly unpicked. Their 1962 management contract with Brian Epstein was their first bad deal because it was weighted so heavily away from them; their second bad deal was their publishing deal covering, originally, the compositions of Lennon and McCartney. In order to understand why McCartney is doing what he is doing, it’s essential to trace the bumpy history of his assignment of rights.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Beatles on TV in 1964. Photograph: ITV/Rex Features

Frustrated by the lacklustre work of Ardmore & Beechwood, EMI’s publishing company in the early 1960s, on Love Me Do, producer George Martin suggested the Beatles speak to publisher Dick James. From that sprung Northern Songs, a company set up specifically to handle their publishing rights. McCartney later claimed he never read the contract properly and simply trusted Epstein to do a good deal. He didn’t. Between them, Epstein, McCartney and Lennon held half the shares while James and his business partner Charles Silver held the other half. (Martin turned down a stake as he felt it was a conflict of interest.) It was only later that McCartney and Lennon discovered they were not in the driving seat of the company – or even in the back seat. They were in the boot.



After Epstein’s death in 1967, they attempted to renegotiate the deal but reached an impasse. Then in 1969, without warning, James sold his stake to ATV, TV mogul Lew Grade’s company, for £1.5m. The Beatles got their ruthless business manager Allen Klein to attempt to buy out ATV in 1969, but a combination of the band’s relationship turning toxic and, amazingly, them running out of money meant it never happened, and they sold their stake in October 1969 for £3.5m. An earlier attempt to buy out the 14% owned by a group of investors known as The Consortium also failed.



It took another twist in 1982 when Australian businessman Robert Holmes à Court acquired ATV’s holding company. McCartney, meanwhile, was buying up publishing catalogues including those of Buddy Holly and Broadway shows. When working with Michael Jackson in the early 1980s, he made the mistake of showing the singer a binder with all the publishing rights he owned, telling him he regretted losing his own composition rights so was buying up other catalogues. Jackson, then the biggest pop star on the planet, needed to invest the huge sums he was earning and got his business manager John Branca to investigate publishing options. In September 1984, Branca called Jackson and said: “I think I heard of a catalogue for sale.” It was ATV, which had a catalogue of about 4,000 titles with an estimated two-thirds of its revenue coming from Lennon/McCartney songs.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Collaborators … McCartney and Michael Jackson in 1983. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Through complex negotiations and brazen brinkmanship, Branca outmanoeuvred not just Richard Branson but also Marty Bandier, then head of EMI Music Publishing and now, paradoxically, the CEO of Sony/ATV, to close the deal for $47.5m. Two things swung it in Jackson’s favour, even though Bandier had offered more money. Jackson agreed to appear at an event in Perth for Holmes à Court’s favourite charity; he also removed the rights for Penny Lane so that Holmes à Court could give them as a gift to his daughter, Penny. Branca claimed that he cleared the deal with Yoko Ono first, making sure she and McCartney were not going to make a joint offer. “No, no, if we [Ono and McCartney] had bought it, then we’d [Ono and ATV] have to deal with Paul,” she reportedly said.



Having burned through a frightening amount of cash over the next decade, Jackson needed capital desperately, so Branca tabled a deal in 1995 whereby Sony could take a stake in ATV as part of a 50/50 joint venture. Zack O’Malley Greenburg’s book Michael Jackson, Inc explains just how unusual the deal was. “The company paid Jackson $115m for the privilege of merging its less valuable catalogue with his, plus an annual guarantee just shy of $10m that has since been negotiated upwards.” The deal also gave Jackson total control over his compositions under Mijac Music as well as those by other songwriters.



More than anything, this illustrates a huge sea change in how musicians approached the music business. Pop stars in the 80s learned to become incredibly business savvy precisely because the stars of two decades earlier had been recklessly naive in their dealings with the money side of things. This must surely have stung McCartney – that the next generation of pop stars had learned from his mistakes, made more money than him and could now buy and sell him. That process continued last week, when Sony announced it was buying out the Jackson estate’s share in Sony/ATV for $750m.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest McCartney and his third wife Nancy Shevell. Photograph: Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

So what does McCartney’s move – made public just a week after the Sony/ATV deal – mean for the company that currently owns his Beatles songs? Lennon/McCartney songs represent a lot of earning potential, but their songs are only a drop in the ocean of the estimated 4m compositions Sony/ATV controls. Plus, if McCartney is successful, this will only affect, for now, his share of 32 co-writes in the US alone. Sony will still control Lennon’s share after brokering a deal with Ono in 2009 and will continue to control the rights to all Lennon/McCartney songs outside the US.



If not quite revenge, then McCartney’s move here is at least an attempt to right his past wrongs and make peace with something that has been eating away at him for half a century. He has always had a complex relationship with his publishing and the legacy of the band. Aside from twice losing the chance to buy his rights, in 2002 he listed Beatles songs on his Back in the US live album as being written by McCartney/Lennon and not the other way round, as they had been traditionally credited. “I think it’s fair and accurate for the songs that John declared were mine to carry my name first,” he said at the time. The following year, a new version of the Let It Be album was released under the title of Let It Be … Naked in which McCartney stripped everything producer Phil Spector did on it, because he had always been unhappy with the album that had been released.



It could be argued that, inch by inch, McCartney has been rewriting Beatles history. Until now, it has mainly been about the creative side of things, but this is one of the biggest financial recalibrations he has undertaken. Whether or not it will salve the pain and frustration of a half-century of bad deals for McCartney is debatable, but its power to add to his and his third wife Nancy Shevell’s estimated net worth of £730m is unarguable.

