Boston’s Tom Scholz in legal dispute over copyrights

Tom Scholz, the leader and principal songwriter of the band Boston, is in a legal squabble with the person who owns the copyrights to some of his biggest hits, including “More Than a Feeling” and “Don’t Look Back.” Bloomberg reports that Scholz is seeking to terminate an agreement he made with Paul Ahern in 1975, and Ahern is suing him to prevent that from happening. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court in New York. Ahern, who lives in Florida and oversees a publishing firm called Pure Songs, contends in the suit that he employed Scholz to write the songs on Boston’s first two albums. Scholz’s bid to end the copyrights “casts a pall on the assets of the compositions, diminishes their value, and complicates the ability of [Ahern] to commercially exploit them,” according to the complaint. Attempts to reach Ahern were unsuccessful Wednesday. Meanwhile, Scholz’s attorney, Craig Pinkus, says the US Copyright Act of 1976 grants his client the authority to terminate Ahern’s copyrights. “We think our view of the law is correct,” Pinkus told us. “To boil it down to the barest of bones, the question is when under the law Tom gets back the copyrights, not if. That’s our view.”