Four days before the hammer, a claim nobody has yet had to prove stopped the sale of an archive estimated at up to £1.6 million and the claimants were asserting rights over tapes they have never held or catalogued. In Toronto next month the body that writes the message standards every distributor uses will spend its twentieth anniversary discussing identifier evolution under Chatham House Rule with no press admitted and not one independent label or publisher body on the programme. In Washington the Copyright Office has quietly asked whether metadata standardisation is a remedy for streaming fraud, which is the half of its inquiry that no trade outlet reported. A Florida court meanwhile found that a catalogue reached Spotify, Amazon, Qobuz and YouTube on one man's assurance that he had the authority to deliver it. Four different failures, one shape: in each of them the document that would have settled the question is a schedule somebody never wrote.
Catalogue Deals
Oasis Stopped A Seven Figure Tape Sale Without Having To Prove It Owns The Tapes
On 29 September the Press Association reported that a collection known as The Desk Tapes had come out of Littleton Auctions' 3 October sale. Managing director Ben Homer said the lots "have been withdrawn from our October 3 auction in light of legal proceedings" and added that the firm was "very disappointed that we cannot offer this significant archive as planned". The rest of that day's memorabilia went ahead as normal. What was pulled was 63 live Oasis shows across 209 DAT tapes, 73 analogue cassettes and three MiniDiscs, plus more than a hundred hours of soundchecks, rehearsals and conversation between band members, taken direct from the front of house desk by Huw Richards, who worked with the band from the release of Definitely Maybe in 1994, joined the crew in 1995 and stayed until 2001. His son Owain consigned them. Estimates ran to £1.6 million.
The trade coverage reported an injunction and moved on. The filing is more interesting than that. Mix, which covered it from the engineer's side rather than the band's, records five claimants including the Oasis Partnership, Sony Music and Big Brother Recordings, with the auction house, Huw Richards and Owain Richards all named as defendants. Owain Richards has said plainly that "Oasis have sued me and my father to try to prevent the auction" and that "we have agreed to postpone the auction to enable the legal dispute to be resolved". He had tried to sell the archive to the band first and those discussions broke down. No new sale date has been set.
So nothing was restrained at a hearing. The lots were withdrawn by agreement between the parties before anybody had to stand up and establish who owns what, which means the ownership question is still formally open while the tapes sit with the family that recorded them. Nobody disputes that the Richards family has possession. The claimants are asserting rights over physical media they do not hold and have never inventoried and the assertion was strong enough on its own to take a seven figure lot off the block.
The leverage here is the plausibility of an ownership claim rather than proof of one. Plausibility was enough, which tells you nobody wanted to find out what proof would have looked like.
A buyer would have discovered the same gap from the other direction. Mix's read is that the band would in all likelihood retain the intellectual property in what is on the tapes, so the successful bidder would have owned the carriers and not the recordings, which is a £1.6 million purchase of boxes you cannot exploit. That is not an exotic trap. It is the ordinary consequence of a working engineer making a soundboard copy every night for seven years while the recording agreements said nothing about session materials, running tapes or archive copies and nobody ever reconciled possession with title because for thirty years nobody needed to.
Compare the catalogue sale of the same week. Pophouse Entertainment took 50 per cent of Sia's publishing and master rights for $180 million through Pophouse Fund I and the consideration was reportedly structured in two parts: $165 million for the songs written before her marriage to Dan Bernad, with $15 million for songs written during it held in escrow pending agreement, plus $1 million to Bernad to waive claims over the earlier material. Variety carries the split as reported by TMZ and notes it has not been confirmed by the parties, so treat the figures as reported rather than established. The structure is what matters either way, because to paper a deal like that the buyer and both spouses had to agree, work by work, which side of a wedding date each song was written on. Date of release is what delivery systems capture. Date of authorship is what matrimonial law, termination windows, reversion clauses and public domain calculations all actually turn on and it is the field most likely to be empty.
Two jobs follow for an independent and neither is expensive. Write the schedule of masters, multitracks, stems, session materials and archive copies into the recording agreement, naming who holds the physical media and who owns what is on it, because the cheapest moment to settle that is before anybody has made anything. Then capture date of first authorship as its own field, distinct from release date, with whatever evidence establishes it, because the moment it is needed is always a moment of forced valuation, meaning a divorce, a death, a reversion notice or a sale and all four arrive without notice.
Sources: Press Association, 29 September 2026, for the withdrawal and the quotes · Mix, 30 September 2026, for the claimants, the defendants and the position on intellectual property · Louder, 1 October 2026 · Variety, 1 October 2026, on the Pophouse acquisition and the reported tranche split
Metadata & Standards
Twenty Years On, DDEX Still Has Identifier Evolution On The Agenda. Press Are Barred And No Independent Body Is On The Programme.
DDEX writes the message standards that every distributor uses to deliver repertoire, so the agenda of its twentieth anniversary day is a reasonable preview of which fields will exist in three years. That agenda was published on 30 September and it is worth reading closely. The Music Tech 20/20 Summit runs on 19 November at the University of Toronto Conference Centre, presented by Meta, with 22 named speakers. Tickets are $650 until 1 November and $770 after, in person only, none at the door. The event page states that Chatham House Rule applies and that "No Press will be allowed at the Summit".
Three sessions bear directly on rights data. "Connecting the Dots: Evolving Identifier Systems for Complex Attribution and Rights Management" puts EIDR, Universal and CISAC in a room with GEMA moderating. "Metadata Without Borders: The Integration of Music Data and Interoperability" is Kobalt and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with BMAT moderating. "Fraud, Trust and AI: Building the Music Industry's Collective Defense" is SOCAN, Beatdapp and Symphonic with Pandora moderating, which is the same verification agenda the US Copyright Office opened a formal inquiry into two days before this issue was compiled, discussed by several of the companies that would have to operate it. The day opens with a welcome from Dan Simpson, DDEX board chair and Meta's Head of Music Operations and closes with his remarks.
A standards body that is still scheduling a panel on evolving identifier systems after twenty years is telling you the identifier problem is not solved. The room where it gets scoped is the one you cannot get into.
Look at who is in the room and who is not. The supporters are SCPP, Beatdapp, the RIAA, Kobalt, SoundExchange, BMI, Music Infrastructure Company, The Recording Academy and MétaMusique. The panels are staffed by majors, societies, platforms, broadcasters and vendors. Not one independent label or publisher body appears anywhere on the published programme or in the supporter list and because the room runs under Chatham House Rule with press excluded, nothing said there is quotable or reportable afterwards. The independent sector therefore has no seat and no transcript, which is an odd position given that independents hold a bigger share of the recorded market than any single major and bear the cost of every identifier gap personally.
There is a narrow, cheap and genuinely available response. The programme is public, the panel titles name the workstreams and the 22 people shaping them are listed with their organisations. Any label or publisher with a view on how identifier systems should evolve, or on what interoperability should mean for a catalogue of four thousand works rather than four million, has six weeks and a published list of names to put it to. A position sent in advance to a panellist is not a seat at the table, though it is a great deal better than reading about the outcome in a specification revision eighteen months later.
Sources, read at source on 8 October 2026: DDEX, Music Tech 20/20 Summit event page, for the venue, pricing, Chatham House Rule and press exclusion · Record of the Day, 30 September 2026, for the full announced schedule and speaker list
Policy & Regulation
The Copyright Office Has Asked Whether Metadata Standardisation Is A Fraud Remedy. Not One Outlet That Covered It Mentioned That.
A notice of inquiry titled Music Streaming Fraud appeared in the Federal Register on 7 October at 91 FR 64188, Docket No. 2026-6, signed by Emily L. Chapuis, General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights. It runs on a letter of 21 May 2026 from Representative Scott Fitzgerald of the House Judiciary Committee to the Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, asking the Office to examine how prevalent streaming fraud is and what it does to the industry. Written comments close on 23 November and reply comments on 21 December, both at 11.59pm Eastern. Ten numbered questions follow and the interesting thing about a notice of inquiry is never the subject, it is which questions the agency decided were worth asking.
Question seven asks how ownership and usage data can help, with sub items on the sharing of suspicious activity reports, on a shared database of known instances of fraud and on metadata standardisation and use. Question six asks about the effectiveness of trusted distributor policies, content verification and customer verification. Question eight asks how the rules governing information sharing could be adjusted. Read together, the Office is openly testing whether the remedy is identification and verification infrastructure rather than enforcement after the event. The notice records that distributors have already bolstered their identity verification departments, created Trust and Safety departments and implemented know your customer protocols and that at least one of them has proposed "a worldwide database of individuals found to be abusing the streaming system", which is a standing register of persons built from data a distributor holds about its own clients.
Every remedy on that list falls on the people who deliver repertoire rather than only on the people abusing the system. A small catalogue that cannot evidence who it is and what it owns is the one a trusted distributor regime will struggle to accommodate.
Now read the coverage. The notice was carried widely on 7 and 8 October and every carrier led on prevalence, enforcement and the Michael Smith sentencing of 6 October. The Music Network's write up mentions that the Office seeks evidence on "checks on customers and content" and never mentions metadata standardisation or the shared database at all. IPWatchdog summarised the ten questions as an enforcement exercise and did not mention metadata either. The material in question seven exists only in the Federal Register text, which is to say it exists only for people who opened the document and it is the part with direct consequences for how a rights holder will be expected to identify itself and its repertoire at the point of delivery.
The practical point is a live window rather than an opinion. The docket is open to anybody, comments close on 23 November and the independent sector's view on how a verification burden should fall on a catalogue of modest size is not currently on the record. If the eventual recommendation is a shared database, a trusted distributor tier or a metadata standard, then the people who deliver four hundred releases a year will be living inside whatever shape it takes and the submissions arguing for proportionality are the ones that have to be written in the next six weeks.
Sources: US Copyright Office, Notice of Inquiry, Music Streaming Fraud, 91 FR 64188, Docket No. 2026-6, 7 October 2026 · The Music Network, 8 October 2026 · IPWatchdog, 7 October 2026
The Cautionary Tale
A Catalogue Reached Every Major Platform On One Man's Assurance That He Had The Authority To Deliver It
In J&N Records LLC and others v Harley Boys Entertainment LLC and others, No. 1:24-cv-20172-DPG, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida granted summary judgment on 16 August 2026 to four independent Latin labels and publishers: J&N Records, J&N Publishing, 829Music Mundial and Mayimba Music. The court's account of what happened is short. Luis Alfredo Silverio, known professionally as Luigui Bleand, founder and chief executive of Harley Boys Entertainment and chief executive of HBE Media Holdings, negotiated a distribution agreement with Warner Music in 2021 and delivered a catalogue into it that included the claimants' works, representing that Harley Boys had the authority to do so. Warner relied on that representation. The recordings went out to Spotify, Qobuz, Amazon and YouTube. The same works were also supplied to Ditto Music and on 22 January 2023 the 829Music recordings were posted to YouTube.
The claimants had given nobody permission to exploit, reproduce or distribute any of it. The court found that they owned or held exclusive distribution and administration rights, that the works were registered and that Silverio had both the authority and the practical ability to prevent the infringement by withholding the works or correcting the rights he had asserted. Statutory damages were elected on 40 works and the infringement was found willful, which carried fees and costs. Settlement talks had already collapsed and defence counsel had withdrawn. Plagiarism Today reports the resulting order against Bleand and two connected companies at $1.2 million.
What is worth taking from this is not that somebody behaved badly. It is that a warranty of authority in a distribution agreement is worth precisely the schedule of works sitting behind it and in this case there was no schedule anybody could test, so the question of whether the deliverer held the rights to the catalogue he was delivering got answered two and a half years later by a federal judge rather than two minutes earlier by a reconciliation against a register. Every platform in the chain behaved reasonably on the information it had. The information it had was one man's word.
Sources: VitalLaw, on the summary judgment in J&N Records LLC v Harley Boys Entertainment LLC, No. 1:24-cv-20172-DPG, S.D. Fla. · Plagiarism Today, 31 August 2026, for the $1.2 million figure and the collapse of settlement talks
On The Wire
Four shorter things. Two of them nobody reported.
Metadata & StandardsDiscogs has written database conduct into a policy with an effective date and closed submission notes to arguments
A new Discogs Platform Behavior Policy took effect on 1 October. Section 7, Community and Database Conduct, prohibits using database edit pages, submission notes or contribution fields for arguments, disputes or any communication "unrelated to database accuracy". It also bars vandalising or obstructing submissions, circumventing the image blurring staff apply for privacy or legal reasons and coordinating with other users to target an individual through reviews or reports. Discogs describes the document as new and says it supplements rather than limits the existing terms, guidelines and seller policies. Contributors on the forum read the targeting wording as ending the habit of carrying a forum disagreement onto somebody else's pending edits and staff confirmed that ordinary peer review is unaffected. No outlet covered any of it. The reason to care is that a crowd maintained index is where a great deal of private diligence on pressing history, credits and release chronology actually gets done, so the route by which a label has been correcting its own catalogue entries by arguing in an edit history is now a policy breach and a volunteer database is formalising its data conduct rules at the exact moment the identifier bodies are not.
Streaming PlatformsSony has doubled its deepfake takedown requests to 260,000 in six months and is still losing ground
Sony Music disclosed to the Financial Times that it had requested the removal of more than 260,000 AI generated tracks imitating its artists as at the end of September, against roughly 135,000 at the end of March, a figure Dennis Kooker had given publicly in May. A Sony spokesperson called it "becoming an uphill struggle", which is an understatement once you set it beside Deezer's report that it ingests almost 75,000 AI generated tracks a day, around 44 per cent of everything arriving. A number that doubles in six months and remains a rounding error against daily intake is evidence that the enforcement route does not scale and the identification route is the only one that does. The narrower point for an independent is easy to miss. A takedown request is an assertion of ownership and all 260,000 of these rest on a major being able to show at volume which recording and which artist identity it is asserting. A label that cannot produce that mapping for its own catalogue cannot file at any scale and it also cannot contest a claim wrongly filed against its own releases.
Label OperationsA publisher with a musicology report sued four companies over Olivia Dean's single and left all three songwriters out of it
Mattie Music Group, which controls the Bill Withers catalogue, filed in the Central District of California on 1 October as case 2:26-cv-11383, claiming that "I've Seen It" from Olivia Dean's album The Art of Loving copies "Just The Two Of Us" in "large and significant part" and citing a musicologist who found substantial similarities. The defendants are Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Sony Publishing and Kobalt Music Publishing America. Dean is not a defendant and neither of her co writers is named. That is a decision about who holds records and who can be made to answer rather than a view on who did the writing and it tells you where a claim of this shape lands: on whoever appears in the registration and distribution data as controlling the work. Two administrators being named means a split work where each will answer for a different percentage of the same song, so each has to produce its own share, its co publishing position and its chain of title quickly enough to decide whether to indemnify, settle or fight. The claim also arrives a year after release, comfortably past the point at which most independents have stopped looking at a record at all.
Read AcrossA federal appeals court has recognised a market for licensing works as AI training material and drawn the line short of generative models
In Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v ROSS Intelligence Inc, No. 25-2153, the Third Circuit held on 29 September that ROSS's use of Westlaw headnotes to build a competing legal research tool was not fair use. Two sentences in the opinion, written by Circuit Judge Montgomery-Reeves, matter to anyone holding a catalogue. On the fourth factor the court found that "the market for licensing headnotes as text to train AI is rapidly developing" and that ROSS "usurped Thomson Reuters's opportunity to enter that derivative market", which establishes that a court will protect a licensing market for training data that a rights holder has not yet entered. On the first factor the panel carved the case down hard, writing that "unlike the AI models in Bartz and In re: OpenAI, ROSS's AI platform cannot generate original expression", so this does not transfer to the generative music cases and nobody should cite it as though it does. Set the two together and the position for a label or publisher is clear enough: the value of your catalogue as training material is now legally cognisable and the precondition for claiming harm to it is being able to show what you own at work level.
And Finally
Half A Million Lost Myspace Tracks Turned Up In An Archive. One Musician Found Eleven Of His Own In There.
Two items from earlier this year rather than this week, because both are too good to leave in the file. The first concerns the Myspace Dragon Hoard, a collection of roughly 490,000 MP3s that an anonymous group of academics scraped from Myspace between 2008 and 2010 and then posted on a hard drive to an Internet Archive employee. It sat there unremarked until Myspace lost everything uploaded between 2003 and 2015 in a 2019 server migration, at which point the Hoard became the only surviving copy of a decade of music and the Archive published it. Anthony Martino, an Illinois musician who had deliberately made his own recordings inaccessible on Myspace around 2011, eight years before the loss, found eleven of them in there, along with scanned liner notes and printed lyrics he claims as a further 48 works. He is seeking the maximum statutory award of $150,000 per work across 59 works, a theoretical $8,850,000. The Archive's answer argues any infringement was innocent and the figure should be $200 per work, which comes to roughly $11,800. The parties have suggested April 2027 for a trial that is not yet scheduled.
The joke is in the arithmetic and the real point is underneath it. A withdrawal from a platform in 2011 turned out to be reversible by a third party scrape nobody knew about and there is no mechanism by which the person who withdrew the work can withdraw it a second time. Any label holding early digital era recordings has material sitting in archives it has never inventoried, which is the same gap the Oasis tapes expose from the opposite end: a catalogue is not only what you can list, it is also whatever exists that you cannot.
The second beat is smaller and more irritating. Murphy Campbell, a North Carolina folk singer who performs traditional Appalachian material, found AI generated covers of her own songs sitting on her Spotify profile in January. In March somebody calling himself Murphy Rider uploaded never published videos through the distributor Vydia and used them to file ownership claims through Content ID against her own legitimate YouTube performances, on the same day a magazine piece about her AI impersonators ran. The claims were released and the account banned. Vydia's founder, by then at gamma, explained why it had worked at all: her recordings were not in any audio content recognition database, so there was nothing for the system to match them against and no reason to doubt the first person who turned up claiming them. The songs themselves date to at least the 1870s and belong to nobody, while her recordings of them are her own copyright, which is exactly the distinction the system could not see. An unfingerprinted recording is an unclaimable one and somebody else will eventually claim it on your behalf.
Sources: TorrentFreak, 10 March 2026, on the Myspace Dragon Hoard claim · Music Business Worldwide, 5 April 2026, on Murphy Campbell
Feature Spotlight
Asset Management: You Cannot Monitor Rights You Have Never Written Down
Every item in this issue turns on the same absence. A seven figure archive with no schedule saying who held the tapes and who owned what was on them. A catalogue priced in two tranches because somebody had to establish, work by work, when each song was written. A distribution agreement whose warranty of authority had no list of works behind it to test. A quarter of a million takedown requests that only work because somebody can map a recording to an artist identity at volume. A folk singer whose own masters were claimed by a stranger because they existed nowhere a matching system could find them.
rightsHUB exists to make the rights position across a catalogue something you can see rather than something you reconstruct. It holds rights, ownership and control at work and recording level, flags where the data a given music recognition partner requires is missing and says which data is needed, so the gaps surface as a list you can work through instead of as a surprise in somebody else's diligence or somebody else's claim. Masters, multitracks, stems, artwork and documents sit against the releases they belong to rather than in a folder beside them, which makes the whole thing the nearest available version of the schedule that none of the stories above had. It is the unglamorous end of music catalogue management UK practice and it is the end that decides what happens on the one day it is tested.
None of this is work anybody wants to do, which is why the cases keep arriving. The useful question is narrow: if somebody asked you tomorrow for a complete list of what you own, what it consists of physically, who granted it and when it was written, how long would the answer take. You can see the rest of the toolkit at rightshub.net/features.
A right you cannot describe is a right you cannot assert, defend or sell. The schedule is the asset.