Fight for Your Right: An Analysis of a Musician’s Ability to Terminate a Copyright Assignment of a Music Recording

Authors

Ian Waldron, University of Georgia School of Law

Abstract

In 2019, musicians joined together to launch two separate lawsuits against Sony Music Entertainment (“Sony”) and Universal Music Group (“UMG”) after the record labels ignored the musicians’ copyright termination notices. Copyright termination is a powerful tool that allows the original owner of a work, under some circumstances, to regain possession years after they have assigned it to another party. To defend their actions, UMG and Sony countered that since the recordings were created under a record deal, they were works for hire and the musicians acted as employees. Therefore, under the record label’s theory, the musicians would have no ownership stake in the music to assign and later terminate. Following a court ruling in the UMG case that the musicians would not be able to continue as a class, the parties in both the UMG and Sony cases reached confidential settlements. Unfortunately, settlement in this context is a recurring cycle as both musicians and record labels want to avoid a court ruling that could be detrimental to their interests. As a result, a court has yet to decide whether musicians who create a song recording while operating a record deal indeed possess the copyright termination power. Relying on the Reid framework, which is the primary test used to determine whether someone acts as an employee in a work for hire arrangement, this Note asserts that musicians do possess copyright termination powers.

Recommended Citation

Ian Waldron, Fight for Your Right: An Analysis of a Musician’s Ability to Terminate a Copyright Assignment of a Music Recording, 33 J. Intell. Prop. L. 307 (2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl/vol33/iss1/11