Shostakovich and three Soviet composers lose their bid to silence 'The Iron Curtain'

The Iron Curtain, Twentieth Century-Fox's spy thriller based on the 1945 defection of Igor Gouzenko from the Soviet Union to Canada, premiered in New York City on May 12, 1948 — the first Cold War film Hollywood had produced. Its soundtrack was built entirely from the works of four celebrated Soviet composers: Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Nikolai Myaskovsky, whose music filled roughly 45 of the film's 87 minutes. The composers, conceding their work was in the public domain under U.S. law, sued Fox's distributor seeking a permanent injunction — arguing, among other grounds, that their moral rights as authors had been violated by the film's anti-Soviet politics. On June 7, 1948, Justice Edward R. Koch of the New York Supreme Court denied the injunction, holding that the public's right to use non-copyrighted works outweighed any moral claim the composers could assert…