Congress, way back when, astutely recognized that an artist entering into an initial contract for an album, song, or story often gets the bummest of bum deals. It further acknowledged that the record label or studio or other corporate demogorgon on the other side of that initial contract often benefits excessively, gobbling up the creative work and all of its copyrights and making most of the money when that work becomes a success.
With these things bouncing around in its hive mind, Congress took action, building Section 304 into the 1909 Copyright Act and Section 203 into the current Act. Both sections seek to remedy the grave imbalance in bargaining positions between budding artists and corporate monoliths by ensuring that artists get a second chance, contractually speaking, to see the fruits of their artistic labor.
Section 203, the modern statute, states that 35 years after that initial transfer, at which point the record label has drunk deeply at the profit trough, the artist can serve a written notice and reclaim the copyrights for the work, at which point he or she can seek out a more remunerative and fair agreement. And Section 304 states that the grant may be terminated at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of 56 years from the date copyright was originally secured.
As you might imagine, these provisions, written to protect and empower artists, make the record labels furious, and those labels have gone all-out to frustrate the law’s purpose. We can fill whole columns with these exploits, but let’s concentrate here on one of the most insidious: the averment that when an artist reclaims their rights under Sections 203/304, they reclaim only their rights in the U.S., with the labels keeping their claws in the rest of the rights around the world.
Now, this argument makes little sense when you consider that when an artist enters into that initial grant, it is almost always a global grant, assigning rights for the copyrighted work to be exploited worldwide. So when an artist terminates that grant, the artist ipso facto, would recover those very same global rights. This result is cemented by the notion that these agreements tend to be entered into in the U.S. between U.S. artists and U.S. labels and cover songs created in the U.S. and covered by U.S. copyright law. But the labels, undaunted, claim that foreign copyright law, in large part, should still apply to limit the artist’s reclamation rights as they pertain to global transfer agreements. And a recent appellate decision rejecting that argument (a result that at least one astute lawyer forecast less than a year ago) has them gnashing their teeth in anguish.
Cyril Vetter co-wrote the song, Double Shot. He transferred global rights away back in the day to a company that transferred them to Resnick Music Group (RMG). This transfer was entered into in the U.S. and had no connection to anywhere else in the world other than it included a global transfer. When Vetter served a notice terminating this global-rights transfer, and seeking to recover all rights transferred thereunder, RMG refused to honor the transfer for any country other than the U.S.
Why? The label’s primary argument hinged on language in Section 304(c)(6)(E), which states that “[t]ermination of a grant under this subsection affects only those rights covered by the grant that arise under this title, and in no way affects rights arising under any other Federal, State, or foreign laws.” The label employed a facile reading of the foregoing to argue that because the rights “arising under this title” in no way affect rights “arising under” foreign law, the termination of the grant does not apply to the exploitation of the song in other countries.
But, as the Fifth Circuit pointed out in ruling for the artist, this zany position “was premised on the theory that there are multiple and separate copyright interests in each country, rather than a single overarching international master copyright that each country is required to honor.” Vetter v. Resnik, No. 25-30108, 2026 WL 82842, (5th Cir. Jan. 12, 2026). Make no mistake, the labels invented this bizarro copyright-multiverse solely to stymie artists in recovering their global rights. It exists in no other context. To the contrary, it is almost universally accepted that one copyright is created under U.S. law once an artist fixes their work in a tangible medium and other countries honor that copyright via various treaties, chiefly the Berne Convention. And it is also settled law that questions of copyright ownership for works created in the U.S. by U.S. artists are covered by U.S. law.
A close read of the language exposes the speciousness of the label’s argument. The word “arise” means “to originate from a source” and the “rights” that arise under the Copyright Act are the exclusive rights set forth in Section 106, which include the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, and perform, and the right to reclaim those rights after the statutory period expures. The artist who transfers those rights away can later recapture them without regard for where those rights are exercised. So, if the initial contract includes the global right to exercise those copyrights, a termination recovers the global rights.
Now there is a general rule that the Copyright Act does not apply extraterritorially when it comes to copyright infringement, and the labels have done well in the past to conflate the issues of “ownership” and “infringement” in their briefs. But the Vetter court rightfully swept those arguments away, adroitly recognizing that ownership and infringement are two separate copyright law concepts, with ownership established by the laws of the country of creation and infringement being addressed by the laws of the country in which the infringement occurred.
The result is unsurprising because the Supreme Court already, in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., looked at similar “under this title” language in the Copyright Act and found there to be no geographic limitation. There, copies of works created “under” the Copyright Act were copies created anywhere in the world, not just the U.S. So true here, as Vetter’s ownership rights arose under the Copyright Act and his termination of a transfer of that ownership returned to him that ownership, with no geographic limitation.
Thus, the first appellate court to review the Copyright Act’s reclamation provisions has concluded, convincingly, that the provisions, enacted to assist artists in reaping a bit more of their creations’ benefits, covers the “worldwide” portion of worldwide transfers and includes no geographic carve-out for the rest of the planet. 2026 will thus be the year that these particular artists’ rights shrug off their cartographic limitations, and artists will benefit, as Congress intended.
Scott Alan Burroughs, Esq. practices with Doniger / Burroughs, an art law firm based in Venice, California. He represents artists and content creators of all stripes and writes and speaks regularly on copyright issues. He can be reached at scott@copyrightLA.com, and you can follow his law firm on Instagram: @veniceartlaw.
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