In a telephone interview from his home in Southern California, Mr. Willis said he has not yet decided how best to exploit the song catalog. “I’ve had lots of offers, from record and publishing companies, a lot of stuff, but I haven’t made up my mind how it’s going to be handled.”

He added, however, that he is thinking of prohibiting the Village People — the band still exists and is touring this month and next, though with largely different members — from singing any of his songs, at least in the United States. Under American law, copyright holders have a right to control the performance of a work at any “place open to the public or at a place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances are gathered.” This designation applies not only to concert halls, but also to arenas and ballparks like Yankee Stadium, where “YMCA” and other Village People songs are perennial favorites.

“I learned over the years that there are some awesome powers associated with copyright ownership,” Mr. Willis said. “You can stop somebody from performing your music if you want to, and I might object to some usages.”

Song publishing and record companies have consistently opposed artists’ efforts to invoke termination rights, which have the potential to affect a company’s bottom line severely. They argue that, in many cases, songs and recordings belong to them in perpetuity, rather than to the artists, because they are “works for hire,” created not by independent contractors but by artists who are, in essence, their employees.

That was initially one of the arguments invoked against Mr. Willis in Federal District Court in Los Angeles. “We hired this guy,” Stewart L. Levy, a lawyer for the companies that controlled the Village People song catalog, said last year. “He was an employee. We gave them the material and a studio to record in and controlled what was recorded, where, what hours and what they did.” Eventually, though, that argument was withdrawn. If the “work for hire” doctrine can’t be made to apply to a prefab group like the Village People, it stands little chance of surviving a test against other artists who emerged in the 1970s and who always had a much greater degree of autonomy, like Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Parliament-Funkadelic.