Definition
Droit de suite (French: "right to follow") carries two distinct legal meanings that diverge sharply by context and era.
1. In intellectual property law (modern primary usage): The right of a visual artist, or the artist's heirs, to receive a percentage royalty each time an original artwork is resold on the secondary market. Unlike copyright in reproductions, droit de suite attaches to the physical object itself and follows it through successive commercial transactions. The right is inalienable in jurisdictions that recognize it — the artist cannot contractually waive it — and it is typically administered through collective rights organizations. Rates, thresholds, and duration vary by jurisdiction.
2. In French civil and creditor law (historical primary usage): The right of a secured creditor to pursue collateral into the hands of third-party transferees. If a debtor transferred encumbered property, the creditor's security interest followed the property, allowing the creditor to proceed against the asset regardless of who held it. This is the meaning recorded in Black's Law Dictionary.
Common Confusion
The two meanings of droit de suite are entirely unrelated in function and should not be conflated. The creditor-law meaning (right to follow collateral) and the artist-resale-royalty meaning share only the literal French translation and the structural idea of a right that "follows" an asset through transfers. In contemporary Anglo-American legal research, droit de suite almost always refers to the artist resale royalty unless the source is a pre-twentieth-century text or a treatise on secured transactions in civil law systems. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources should confirm which sense is intended before drawing conclusions.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Artist Resale Royalty (resale royalty right): The modern intellectual property variant. Recognized in the European Union under Directive 2001/84/EC, in the United Kingdom (retained post-Brexit), and in Australia, among other jurisdictions. Not federally recognized in the United States as of the time of writing, though California enacted a resale royalty statute (California Resale Royalties Act, Cal. Civ. Code § 986) that was subsequently limited by federal courts on preemption grounds.
Droit de suite in secured/creditor law: The civil law concept of a security interest that follows encumbered property into third-party hands. Analogous in function to the Anglo-American concept of a lien running with the property, though the doctrinal framework differs. Rarely encountered in this sense outside historical or comparative law contexts.
Why It Matters in Research
The bifurcated meaning is a research trap. A researcher working in intellectual property law who searches the Law Mind corpus for "droit de suite" will find the term appearing in historical legal dictionaries in its creditor-law sense — which is entirely inapplicable to artists' rights questions. The inverse problem occurs for researchers in secured transactions history who may encounter modern uses of the term and misread them as relevant to their inquiry.
Jurisdictional coverage in the corpus will be uneven. Sources predating the EU Directive (2001) will either omit the artist resale royalty meaning entirely or treat it as an exotic civil law curiosity. French and continental European legal sources will use the term in both senses with more nuance than Anglo-American sources, which typically imported only one meaning at a time.
For intellectual property researchers: the absence of federal recognition in the United States means American primary sources are sparse. Researchers should expect to work across EU, UK, and Australian materials. The California statute and its litigation history is the main American thread.
For legal history researchers: the creditor-law meaning connects to broader questions about the nature of real security, the mobility of property rights, and civilian versus common law approaches to secured transactions. Black's single-sentence entry is a starting point only.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary captures only the creditor-law meaning: "the right of a creditor to pursue the debtor's property into the hands of third persons for the enforcement of his claim." This entry reflects the term's usage in Anglo-American legal sources at the time of compilation, when the artist resale royalty concept had not yet reached English-language legal dictionaries. The entry is accurate as far as it goes but is now incomplete as a reference for contemporary legal research.
No other historical dictionary sources were available for synthesis. The absence of the artist resale royalty meaning from Black's is itself historically significant: it marks a point before droit de suite became a live question in common law intellectual property debates. Researchers should treat the Black's entry as representing the term's historical import into Anglo-American law from French civil law, not as a comprehensive account of the term's current legal meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
The artist resale royalty right is mandatory across EU member states under Directive 2001/84/EC and applies in the United Kingdom under retained law. Australia recognizes it by statute. The United States does not recognize a federal resale royalty right; California's attempt was significantly constrained by the Ninth Circuit. Researchers should not assume that analysis from EU or UK sources translates to American practice.