The announcement of a publishing deal between Paul McCartney and Lew Grade’s ATV/Northern Songs was announced on 1 June 1972.
McCartney and Grade had been in dispute for some months over McCartney’s sharing of songwriting credits with his wife Linda McCartney, which Grade suspected was a ruse to take a greater share of publishing royalties.
McCartney’s legal representative, his father-in-law Lee Eastman, negotiated a solution: if McCartney signed a co-publishing deal with ATV, backdated to April 1971 and extending to the end of 1979, all publishing credits and royalties would revert to MPL on 1 January 1980. It would include all new songs and everything published since ‘Another Day’, with the exception of the Ram songs co-written with Linda.
Grade’s offer also had the sweetener that ATV would assign half of its publishing royalty to McCartney, giving Paul an increased percentage of all record sales. The settlement was negotiated in March 1972, but McCartney requested time to consider the offer.
He accepted it in early June. A joint statement from ATV and McCartney Music announced that “all differences have been amicably settled.” The full terms of the deal were not made public.