A counterfeit recording was delivered to streaming services carrying the real ISRC of a Juice Newton master, which nothing in the ingest chain stopped. In the same fortnight a federal judge threw out a $102.15 million publishing claim because the claimant could not say, work by work, what it owned; a circuit court held that missing credit data is not the same thing as removed credit data; and the Supreme Court was asked whether a US termination takes back the whole world. Different courts, different standards bodies, one question sitting underneath all of them. Not what do you own. What can you prove you own, to whom and in what format.
Metadata & Standards
A Counterfeit Recording Was Delivered Under A Real ISRC. No Amount Of Your Own Discipline Prevents That.
Universal Music Group filed a 52 page complaint against DistroKid in the District of Delaware on 15 September, pleading copyright infringement and deceptive trade practices. Every outlet led on the AI angle, on the nearly 2,000 named infringing recordings and on accounts such as Lofi Chill, which UMG says released 4,562 tracks in a twelve month period. The allegation that should concern an independent label sits further down the filing. UMG says a DistroKid distributed track titled Juice Newton, credited to an artist called Candy DuIfer, was delivered bearing the same ISRC as Juice Newton's own recording of Angel Of The Morning.
Consider what that means mechanically. The ISRC is the key the entire recorded music supply chain treats as unique, the string that tells a platform, a society, a distributor and a buyer's diligence team that two files are the same recording. Nothing in the ingest process authenticates that the party supplying a code is the party the code was issued to. It is a value typed into a field. A label can register every identifier correctly, map every work to its composition and keep every split current, then still find its recording misidentified because somebody else's upload asserted its identifier first.
The ISRC is not a credential. It is a claim typed into a field that never asks who you are.
Scale makes this worse rather than better. Hypebot puts DistroKid's share of new music uploaded globally at an estimated 30 to 40 per cent, so the ingest policy of one company is effectively the ingest policy for a third of everything released. UMG describes the recordings it has named as the tip of the iceberg and expects discovery to run much further. It also alleges that DistroKid continued delivering tracks to other services after conceding it lacked the rights, which is the detail with the sharpest operational edge: a successful takedown at one platform does not necessarily propagate to the next one.
The layer that ought to be answering this has said nothing. The ISRC registration agency's most recent bulletin remains 2025/01, on agency codes for automated assignment. An identifier scheme is now the subject of a federal complaint about impostor use and the body that administers it has published no guidance in over a year.
The day before UMG filed, IMPALA published five commitments on streaming integrity. The first is to "verify rights ownership and customer identities through robust rights verification and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes" and the second adds metadata and lyric checks, audio recognition and checks against other databases. That is a public admission that distribution onboarding has been taking ownership claims on trust. The signatory list runs to the majors, Merlin, WIN and the distributors a great many independents use, including AWAL, The Orchard, FUGA, ADA, CD Baby, Symphonic, Secretly Distribution, RouteNote, Ditto and Too Lost. The absentees are the interesting half. DistroKid, Believe and TuneCore, TikTok's SoundOn, UnitedMasters, ONErpm, Stem, LANDR and Amuse are all missing from it. The published text also contains no audit requirement, no reporting obligation and no penalty for falling short.
What that produces is a two speed ingest market rather than an industry fix. If you deliver through a signatory, expect rights verification and identity checks to reach existing accounts and not only new ones, which means delivery holds land before disputes do. If you deliver through a non signatory, expect services and diligence buyers to price your catalogue as higher risk however clean it actually is. Either way the useful work this week is the same and it is unglamorous: pull a register of every ISRC you have been issued, confirm each one resolves to the recording you think it does, then keep dated evidence of issuance somewhere that is not a distributor dashboard you do not control.
Sources: Digital Music News · CelebrityAccess · IMPALA, full text of the five commitments · Hypebot · ISRC bulletins, IFPI
Policy & Regulation
The Termination Case At The Supreme Court Is Not The Case The Trade Press Is Describing.
Cyril Vetter wrote Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love) in Baton Rouge in the early 1960s. The Swingin' Medallions had the hit with it in 1966. Sixty years later the Fifth Circuit held that when he exercised his statutory right to terminate the old grant, he recaptured the work "throughout the world and not merely in the United States", treating a US work as carrying a single copyright rather than a bundle of separate national ones. BMG Rights Management and three other publishers have petitioned the Supreme Court. Vetter filed his brief in opposition on 14 September. As of compile the docket in No. 25-1391 shows no distribution for conference and no grant, so this is pending rather than decided.
The reporting has mostly framed it as songwriters reclaiming their copyrights after 35 years. That is section 203 of the Copyright Act, which governs grants made from 1978 onwards. This case is not that. Double Shot runs under section 304(c), which gives an author who transferred rights before 1978 a five year window opening 56 years into the copyright. The distinction is load bearing for anyone scoping a review. Under section 203 the exposure reaches post 1978 grants and therefore most modern catalogues. Under section 304 it reaches pre 1978 works with live renewal terms, a far smaller set whose dates can be calculated exactly. A publisher acting on the 35 year framing scopes its diligence wrongly in both directions at once, reviewing far too much recent material while missing the works actually at risk.
Section 203 reaches most modern catalogues. Section 304 reaches a precisely datable set of pre 1978 works. Scope the review off the wrong one and you pay for it twice.
For a UK independent with any pre 1978 US repertoire the practical consequence is territorial. Sub-publishing and licensing arrangements are papered territory by territory on the assumption that a US termination is a US event. If the Fifth Circuit's reading survives, the question of which territories you still control stops being answerable from the deal file alone, with the answer arriving from somebody else's notice rather than from your own records. The work to do now is to run the termination windows against the pre 1978 catalogue rather than waiting to be told.
One detail deserves its own sentence. The publishers were not parties in the right posture to appeal, so they bought a stake in the song from another rights holder to put themselves there. Vetter's brief says the interest was purchased "solely to manufacture an opportunity to file a petition for certiorari". Whatever the court makes of that, it is a striking valuation event: a fractional share in a single 1966 composition was worth acquiring for its litigation position rather than for anything it earns. Supporting the petition are the RIAA and IFPI, alongside Paramount, the Motion Picture Association and a group of intellectual property law professors, which makes this one of the rare occasions on which recorded music trade bodies have lined up behind publishers against a songwriter.
Sources: Supreme Court docket, No. 25-1391 · Patently-O · IPWatchdog · Digital Music News
Technology
A Circuit Court Has Ruled That Absent Credit Data Is Not Removed Credit Data. Your Own Files Are The Evidence Now.
On 16 September the Ninth Circuit decided Doe 1 v GitHub, No. 24-7700, the first appellate ruling anywhere on whether copyright management information claims reach the outputs of a generative model. It held that they do not. A newly generated output is not a copy from which anything was removed. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supported the outcome, put it plainly: removing copyright information from a copyrighted work is fundamentally different from creating a new work that did not carry that information in the first place. The court also declined to rest the result on the identicality test that lower courts had been using, setting aside the frame rather than refining it.
Section 1202 of the DMCA matters to small rights holders out of all proportion to how often it is discussed. It carries statutory damages of $2,500 to $25,000 for each act of removal and it does not require proving market harm, which made it the one theory an independent catalogue could realistically afford to run when its ISRCs, ISWCs, writer credits and ownership strings came off somewhere in the pipeline. That route is now closed on the output side. If a model emits something without your credit data attached, the absence is not itself evidence that anybody stripped it.
Section 1202 was the claim a small catalogue could actually afford to bring. What is left in its place is a filing cabinet.
The surviving half is the part worth acting on. The input side theory, that credit information was stripped at the point of ingestion rather than at the point of output, was waived by the plaintiffs rather than decided by the court, so it remains open for whoever pleads it properly. That is a drafting instruction dressed as a footnote. Pleading it properly means being able to show that the information was embedded and present in the files as delivered, which is a records question long before it is a legal one.
So the honest question for a label this week is not about litigation strategy at all. It is whether you hold a dated copy of what you actually delivered, with the tags intact, separate from the distributor that delivered it. Most do not, because the delivery package has always been treated as a transient artefact rather than as evidence. It has just become evidence.
Sources: Chat GPT Is Eating The World, on Doe 1 v GitHub, No. 24-7700 · EFF Deeplinks
The Cautionary Tale
A Publisher Pleaded 681 Works And Could Not Say Which Ones It Owned. The $102 Million Claim Ended Before Anyone Read The Merits.
On 9 September Judge John F. Walter of the Central District of California dismissed Wixen Music Publishing's action against Meta. The claim was for $102.15 million across roughly 681 compositions. It did not fail because the works were not infringed, because the defence was strong or because the damages were overstated. It failed on standing, on a ground every independent should read twice: the court found that Wixen had not specified, for any particular work, whether it was the owner or an exclusive licensee of that work.
That distinction decides who is allowed in the room. Under Ninth Circuit law a co-owner cannot unilaterally grant an exclusive licence, so a party holding a licence from one co-owner of a jointly written song holds a non-exclusive licence in practice, which leaves it no right to sue on its own. Wixen conceded it lacked standing on around a hundred of the compositions. The leave to amend expired on 18 September.
There is no moral in this and nobody was careless in any way that would look obvious at the time. A real publisher with a real catalogue and real writers lost a nine figure case because its administration records described its relationships in aggregate rather than work by work. Any independent whose splits and assignments live across a spreadsheet, an email thread and a distributor dashboard has the same condition, dormant, until the first day it needs to enforce something. The administration record is not housekeeping that supports the claim. It is the thing that decides whether there is a claim.
Sources: Digital Music News, on the order of Judge John F. Walter, C.D. Cal., 9 September 2026
On The Wire
Three shorter things, two of which nobody reported.
Label OperationsDistroKid's terms of service have not been touched since September 2024
Two years and fourteen days separate the effective date on DistroKid's terms, "as of September 1, 2024", from the day Universal sued it. Across that period AI generated uploads went from a curiosity to the subject of a federal complaint, chart bodies began requiring disclosure and every major platform introduced a labelling regime. The contract governing what a customer warrants about the rights in an upload was not amended once. Nobody reported this because reading a terms page is not news until it is.
Metadata & StandardsApple made its AI tag mandatory in a press briefing and optional in the specification
Apple told content providers in August that AI Transparency Tags would be required wherever artificial intelligence generated a material portion of a release. The tag itself lives in the Apple Music specification, still at version 5.3.26 dated April 2026, where it remains optional and where the text states that if the tag is omitted, none is assumed. The values the specification sets out are Artwork, Composition, Track and Music Video, none of which describes mastering, stem separation or vocal tuning, with no field at all for degree of use. A month after the announcement the document that defines the field has not been revised to match it, so the practical instruction for a label is to ask its distributor whether that field is populated at all and to start taking written AI use declarations from producers at delivery.
Read AcrossAnother industry switched on default deny for AI crawlers this week. Music is still sending emails.
Cloudflare's default block on mixed use AI crawlers took effect on 15 September for new customers, for new sites and for free plan sites whose owners had not changed their dashboard settings. Search only indexing still passes, while crawlers that decline to separate training from search are blocked outright. Web publishing now has a working technical opt out priced at infrastructure level, while music still relies on contract clauses and on an EU machine readable rights reservation whose qualifying protocols the Commission has not published, 239 days after the consultation closed. The catch worth knowing before anyone copies the approach: blocking AI training crawlers can also catch Googlebot, because Google runs one crawler for search and for training, so an artist site that switches this on carelessly can quietly leave the search index.
And Finally
A Christian Metal Band, A Netflix Blockbuster And One Fan Who Wanted $500 Back
Demon Hunter have been making Christian metal since 2000. Their name was registered as a trademark in 2014 for live performances and extended in 2022 to cover recorded music and merchandise, which is exactly the sort of unglamorous housekeeping this newsletter spends most of its time recommending. Then Netflix released an animated film called KPop Demon Hunters, filed around ten trademark applications of its own from August 2025 onwards. The band sued.
Trademark claims turn on confusion, so the complaint has to show that real people actually got the two things mixed up. The evidence pleaded is one fan, in Albany, New York, in February, asking for a $500 refund on Demon Hunter concert tickets. Netflix says the allegations are without merit and that it looks forward to defending the matter vigorously, which is what everyone says. There is a serious point buried in this and it is not the one you would expect: a twelve year old registration in a niche genre is worth very little against a mass market entrant unless you can evidence confusion, which turns out to be an extremely specific thing to have to go and find.
Elsewhere in the department of rights nobody checked, A24 took distribution this month on a horror feature adapted from the SCP Foundation, a collaborative fiction wiki that has been accumulating anonymous contributors since 2007 under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike licence. Share Alike means the derivative inherits the licence, which is why the wiki's administrators have stated that A24 "does not and cannot have any exclusive rights to anything related to the SCP Foundation". Nobody involved appears to have asked them beforehand. Worth a smile, then worth a thought about every remix competition, sample pack, fan contribution and Creative Commons stem sitting somewhere in your own catalogue. The diligence question was never whether the licence permits commercial use. It is whether it permits exclusivity.
Sources: Blabbermouth · Plagiarism Today
Feature Spotlight
DataDoktor: The Catalogue You Can Evidence Is The Only Catalogue You Actually Hold
Read this issue back and the same shape appears in every story. Wixen could not say per work whether it owned or licensed. The Ninth Circuit has made your delivered files the only proof that your credit data was ever there. UMG's complaint says an identifier you were issued can be asserted by somebody else entirely. In each case the asset was real and the evidence was the thing that failed.
DataDoktor is the music metadata validation tool inside rightsHUB. It exists to turn that evidence question into a scheduled task rather than a discovery. It scans a whole catalogue against the standards the industry actually runs on, validating ISRC, ISWC, IPI, CAE and ISNI against DDEX ERN, RDR, MWN and CWR specifications. It checks that writers, composers, performers and producers are completely credited with their identifiers attached rather than as free text names. It flags duplicates, malformed codes and missing mappings, then returns a prioritised list of what to fix first, which can be corrected in bulk in the same place. Set it to run on a schedule and the catalogue stays clean as it grows rather than being cleaned once and drifting.
None of that wins a case on its own. What it does is make the answer to "which works do you own, in what capacity, with which identifiers, evidenced how" a report you can run this afternoon instead of a project you start the week a claim, a sale or a delivery hold forces you to.
Validate before you deliver. The paperwork people defer is the paperwork that decides whether a claim exists.