Music Majors, BMG Urge Supreme Court to Overturn Copyright Termination Ruling

Majors and BMG ask US Supreme Court to overturn copyright termination ruling they say will cause ‘chaos’

June 22, 2026 By Mandy Dalugdug

The major music companies and BMG have asked the US Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that lets songwriters reclaim the worldwide rights to their songs under American law.

In a petition filed on June 11, the rightsholders warned that the decision would unleash “chaos” on the industry if left to stand, and asked the justices to reverse a January ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

You can read the petition  in full here.

The ruling held that a songwriter exercising their termination right recaptures the worldwide rights once signed away, not just the US copyright.

Termination, written into the 1976 Copyright Act, lets creators undo an old transfer and reclaim their rights, 35 years after the grant, or 56 years for pre-1978 works.

Until that decision, the long-standing industry view was that termination reached only US rights, with overseas rights staying with the publisher.

The case grew out of Cyril Vetter’s effort to reclaim Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love) , the rock song he co-wrote with Donald Smith in 1962.

Vetter and Smith transferred their rights to Windsong Music Publishers in 1963, and the song later passed to publisher Resnik Music Group.

The petition is the latest step in a fight that has been building toward the Supreme Court for months.

In March, the publishing arms of Universal Music Group , Sony Music , and Warner Music Group , together with BMG, acquired the disputed stake in Double Shot in order to take the case to the Supreme Court.

The petitioners are named in the filing as Capitol CMG, Essential Music Publishing, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing, and BMG Rights Management.

“In a single stroke, the decision below unsettled 50 years of industry practice,” wrote Paul Clement, the Supreme Court attorney leading the petition.

The ruling, he added, “immediately calls into question the scope and meaning of countless negotiated agreements backed by billions of dollars.”

Clement called the decision “profoundly wrong,” and the petition pointedly quoted the songwriter’s own side describing their position as a “fringe” theory that “bucks the common industry reading of the statute.”

The publishers argued the statute limits termination to US rights, pointing to Section 304’s provision that termination “in no way affects rights arising under any other Federal, State, or foreign laws.”

The Fifth Circuit’s reading was one that, for decades, “virtually no one even tried to argue” was possible, the petition said.

Left unchecked, the decision is “every bit as disruptive as it sounds,” Clement wrote, adding that “the resulting chaos benefits no one.”

The petition also invoked Paul McCartney’s 2017 suit against Sony/ATV to recapture Beatles songs: under the settled understanding a British writer holds distinct US rights he can recapture, but Vetter’s theory, the publishers argued, would mean McCartney never had any US rights to reclaim at all.

Responding to the petition, Tim Kappel, the attorney who led Vetter’s case, told Billboard the filing is “well-written” but “covers no real new ground and traffics in the same arguments that were rejected by the courts below.”

When Vetter files his response next month, he will add Joshua Rosenkranz to his team, the Orrick litigator who won a landmark Supreme Court victory for Cox Communications , on March 25, when the justices unanimously rejected the record companies’ bid to hold the ISP liable for its subscribers’ piracy — the case that had produced a USD $1 billion jury verdict in 2019.

The termination fight is one of several the majors are waging, with Universal Music Group separately contesting a termination bid by Salt-N-Pepa over their master recordings.

Justice Samuel Alito had granted the publishers two extensions to file, the most recent setting the June 11 deadline, according to the Supreme Court’s docket .

Once briefing wraps, the court will decide whether to grant review, a long shot regardless, since the justices take only a sliver of the cases put before them each term. Music Business Worldwide

News United States BMG BMG Rights Management Capitol CMG Cyril Vetter Essential Music Publishing Robert Resnik Sony Music Publishing Universal Music Group Warner Music Group Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Warner/Chappell Music

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_Originally reported by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/majors-and-bmg-ask-us-supreme-court-to-overturn-copyright-termination-ruling-they-say-will-cause-chaos/)._