Hank's IP Brew — Issue #16

Howdy, y'all.

This week: Congress just introduced the most serious attempt yet to rewrite the rules of college athletics — and buried inside it are provisions that affect every athlete, agent, and brand working in NIL. Plus, indie musicians just got a bill that could finally give them the same bargaining power the major labels have had for decades. Two different industries, same underlying fight: who gets to control your name, your music, and the deals around them.

Let's get into it.

On May 27, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) — the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee — introduced the Protect College Sports Act of 2026. It's bipartisan, it has White House backing, and Commerce Committee hearings could begin as soon as this week. This one has real momentum.

Most of the coverage has focused on transfer portal limits and coaching contracts. But the NIL provisions are the more consequential part for creators and brands working in the college sports space — and they cut in two directions at once.

What the bill does for athletes

The Act creates a federal NIL right, replacing the current patchwork of 50-plus state laws with a single national standard. That means an athlete at a Texas school and an athlete at a Washington school operate under the same rules, and a brand cutting deals across multiple markets deals with one framework instead of dozens.

Agent regulation gets tightened significantly. Agents who work with college athletes would need to be certified by the newly named "Intercollegiate Athletic Association," and their fees would be capped at 5%. That's a direct response to reports of athletes being locked into predatory representation contracts before their NIL value was even established.

Schools would also be required to cover sports-related medical costs for five years after an athlete's final competition — a significant protection that didn't exist before.

What the bill does to NIL deal structures

Here's where brands and collectives need to pay close attention. The bill specifically strengthens the College Sports Commission's enforcement authority over third-party NIL deals — including closing loopholes that have let schools route pay-for-play money through corporate sponsors and multimedia rights partners.

If you've been following Issues #11, #14, and #15, you know we've been tracking the CSC's growing enforcement reach over companies like Learfield and Playfly. The Cruz/Cantwell bill codifies and expands that oversight. The "associated entity" classification — the legal category that determines whether a third party's NIL deals are subject to revenue-sharing cap scrutiny — would get statutory teeth. What the arbitrators have been deciding case by case, Congress is proposing to write directly into law.

The bill also grants the NCAA limited antitrust protection to enforce rules on transfers and third-party deals without facing the kind of litigation that dismantled the old amateurism model. That's a significant shift. For years, the NCAA's enforcement authority was being systematically eroded by antitrust suits. This bill hands some of it back — but in a restructured form, with athlete protections built in.

What to watch

Commerce Committee hearings were expected to begin this week. The resolution timeline is months, not weeks — this is still legislation, not law. But the bipartisan structure and White House support make this the furthest a college sports reform bill has gotten in years. Athletes, agents, brands, and multimedia rights companies all have a stake in the outcome.

If you're signing NIL deals right now: the fundamentals haven't changed. But the statutory landscape these deals will operate in is actively being rewritten. Document everything. Build paper trails. And watch the hearings.

On May 21, Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) reintroduced the Protect Working Musicians Act. If it passes, independent musicians and small labels would get something they've never had before: the legal right to band together and collectively negotiate licensing fees with AI companies and streaming platforms.

Right now, they can't do that. Federal antitrust law treats collective negotiation by competitors as price-fixing — even when those "competitors" are independent musicians with no market power. So when Spotify or Suno sets its terms, an indie artist has two options: accept the deal, or walk away from the platform. There's no third option of "let's negotiate."

Major labels don't have this problem. They control enough catalog that platforms need them. They can walk away from the table and it means something. Independent musicians can't.

What the bill actually does

The PWMA would grant indie artists and small labels an antitrust exemption — the same type of carve-out that already exists for Major League Baseball, and for agricultural cooperatives that let farmers collectively market their crops. The analogy isn't accidental. Congress has a long history of recognizing when market power is so imbalanced that antitrust rules designed to protect consumers end up protecting the wrong party.

With the exemption, indie artists could form collective bargaining units, establish minimum licensing rates, and walk into negotiations with AI companies and streaming platforms as a group rather than individually. As Rep. Ross put it to Billboard: "Antitrust law currently prohibits musicians from banding together to negotiate with these platforms as a group. The platforms are able to divide and conquer them."

The bill has already drawn support from the American Association of Independent Music, the Music Artists Coalition, the Artist Rights Alliance, the National Music Publishers' Association, and SAG-AFTRA.

Why this matters beyond musicians

The dynamic this bill addresses — a platform with massive market power setting terms on a take-it-or-leave-it basis with individual creators — isn't unique to music. It's the same structural problem that shows up in every sector where AI companies need large amounts of human-created content to train their models.

The PWMA is the first serious attempt to use antitrust exemption as the fix. If it passes and survives legal challenge, it becomes a template. Visual artists, writers, photographers, voice actors — every creator community currently negotiating one-on-one with platforms that don't need any single one of them will be watching how this plays out.

The bill has been introduced twice before — in 2021 and 2023 — without making it through. The difference now is the political environment: AI licensing is no longer a niche policy debate, it's a top-line issue with active congressional attention from multiple directions. Whether that's enough to finally push it across the finish line is the open question.

For indie creators of any kind: this is the policy fight that could structurally change your leverage with every platform you deal with. Worth knowing it exists.

See you next time,

Hank

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About Hank's IP Brew

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