Hank's IP Brew — Issue #32

Howdy, y'all.

No NIL scouting report this week — the PCSA passed the Senate but the House is in recess until November, and "bill awaits House action" isn't useful to anyone right now. We'll cover it properly when there's something to actually act on.

Instead: two stories about creators taking back control. One about an AI music company finally doing things the right way — and what it means that the lawsuits keep coming anyway. One about a dancehall legend using a 35-year-old law to claw back songs he signed away when he was young and the industry held all the cards.

Let's get into it.

No NIL scouting report this week — the PCSA passed the Senate but the House is in recess until November, and "bill awaits House action" isn't useful to anyone right now. We'll cover it properly when there's something to actually act on.

Instead: two stories about creators taking back control. One about an AI music company finally doing things the right way — and what it means that the lawsuits keep coming anyway. One about a dancehall legend using a 35-year-old law to claw back songs he signed away when he was young and the industry held all the cards.

Let's get into it.

On September 9, Suno launched v6 — three new AI music models it says were trained from scratch on a new dataset built entirely from licensed music. Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe are the named partners. The older models are retired. The company's chief product officer called it "a new chapter."

It is, genuinely, a significant moment. Suno v6 is the first AI music model from a major generative platform that arrives with a licensing foundation built in from the start rather than bolted on after the lawsuits. That's not a small thing. The entire music industry copyright fight over AI has been premised on the argument that training without permission is infringement — and here is an AI music company building a model that starts with permission.

The lawsuits keep coming anyway.

What v6 actually is

Three models. The flagship v6 is available to paying subscribers and is designed for controlled, high-quality outputs. v6-wild is an experimental version, also for paid users, built for unexpected results. v6-mini is a faster, lighter version available to all users including free accounts. All previous Suno models are retired from the platform — an announcement Suno had previewed in August.

The chief product officer, Jack Brody, was careful about how he described the role of licensed data in the new models. "The wrong way to think about these partnerships is that they are about the data, or even specifically improving the model," he told Music Ally. "The vast majority of what makes a model great at this point is the technical breakthroughs of the team, the taste of the team, the accumulation of learnings over many years of building these things."

That's a notable framing. He's saying the licenses are not primarily what makes v6 better — they're about something else. The "something else" is the relationship with the industry and the legal posture going forward. Suno isn't claiming licensed data produces better music. It's claiming licensed data produces a cleaner legal foundation.

Why retiring the old models doesn't end the lawsuits

This is the part most coverage missed. Retiring v6's predecessors from the platform does not make the lawsuits based on those models go away. UMG and Sony are still litigating in Massachusetts over training conduct that occurred before v6 existed. Jason Isbell filed suit September 1. Canadian collecting society SOCAN filed suit September 3. Round Hill Music filed in August. Those cases are about what old Suno did, not what new Suno is doing.

Music Ally put it well: retiring the old models "feels like more of an attempt to create a clean legal boundary between 'old' and 'new' Suno, focusing the legal battles on legacy models that don't exist on the platform."

That's smart litigation positioning, not a get-out-of-lawsuits-free card. The damages exposure from the old models doesn't disappear because Suno launched a new one.

What this means for creators and the licensing market

Here's what Suno v6 does establish: that AI companies can build commercially viable generative music products with licensed training data. That matters because the labels' litigation strategy has always been premised partly on the argument that licensing is viable — that AI companies don't need to steal because they can pay. Suno just proved the model works. Warner, BMG, and Believe are participating. Royalties flow to rights holders under the licensed content. A remix feature is coming that requires artist opt-in.

That proof of concept raises the floor for every other AI music platform. If Suno can do it, courts and regulators have less patience for competitors who claim they can't. It also raises the floor for what creators can reasonably demand: if the template exists, the question is no longer whether licensing AI training is possible — it's how much it's worth.

For independent musicians and songwriters watching this: the labels negotiated revenue share terms for v6 that haven't been fully disclosed. What those terms look like, and whether they extend to independent artists through distributors like Believe and TuneCore, will matter a great deal for how much of the AI licensing market flows beyond the majors. Worth watching.

On September 11, Reginald Gordon — known to the world as Shabba Ranks — filed a lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan against Greensleeves Publishing Ltd., seeking to reclaim US publishing rights to some of the biggest songs of his career: "Mr. Loverman," "Housecall," "Slow and Sexy," "Let's Get It On," and "Dem Bow," the 1990 track whose rhythm became the foundational beat of reggaetón.

The legal tool he's using is one of the most powerful — and underused — provisions in American copyright law: the right of termination.

What copyright termination actually is

When Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976, it included a provision specifically designed to protect creators from bad deals they made early in their careers. The idea was straightforward: a young musician in 1989 negotiating with a record label or publisher has essentially no leverage. Whatever they sign, they sign. The industry knows this. The contracts reflect it.

Congress decided that wasn't the end of the story. Under Section 203 of the Copyright Act, an author who assigned their copyright — or their heirs — can terminate that assignment after 35 years, regardless of what the original contract says. The right cannot be waived in advance. No matter how the contract is worded, the statutory right survives.

The mechanics: the author must serve a written termination notice no earlier than 10 years and no later than 2 years before the termination date. The termination window opens 35 years after the assignment. If the author doesn't act within a 5-year window around that date, the right lapses and the original grantee keeps the copyright permanently.

Shabba Ranks signed his publishing deal with Greensleeves in 1989. Thirty-five years puts the termination window squarely in the mid-2020s. He served notice in 2023. Greensleeves said no. He sued.

The work-for-hire fight at the center of the case

Greensleeves isn't contesting the math. Their defense is that the termination right doesn't apply because the songs are "works made for hire" — a category explicitly excluded from the termination statute.

This is a common industry counter-argument, and it runs into a serious legal problem. Works made for hire fall into two categories under US copyright law: works created by employees within the scope of their employment, and nine categories of works specially commissioned for certain defined uses (like contributions to collective works, compilations, or motion pictures) where the parties agree in writing that it's a work for hire.

Musical compositions are not on that list of nine categories. And Shabba Ranks was not an employee of Greensleeves. He was an independent recording artist.

His attorneys at Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt put it directly in the complaint: "The compositions are not and could not have been works made for hire under the US Copyright Act, regardless of the language of the assignment. Gordon was never at any time an employee of [Greensleeves], and musical compositions are not recognised in the US Copyright Act as a type of work that can be deemed a work made for hire simply by agreement between the hiring party and a non-employee author."

In other words: calling it a work for hire in the contract doesn't make it one. Congress wrote the definition of works made for hire into the statute. Publishers can't contract around it.

Why this fight is happening everywhere right now

The Shabba Ranks case is one of several major copyright termination battles playing out simultaneously. Salt-N-Pepa is fighting Universal Music Group over the same provision. The major labels themselves are currently petitioning the Supreme Court to reverse a recent ruling that extended termination rights overseas — a ruling that, if it stands, would let artists claw back foreign rights they never expected to recover.

The 35-year clock on music from the late 1980s and early 1990s is running. That era produced an enormous volume of catalog that was signed under unfavorable terms to artists who had little bargaining power. Greensleeves is not the only publisher that will face termination claims on that material. Every rights holder sitting on catalog from 1989 to 1992 is watching these cases.

What creators should take from this

Three things.

First, if you assigned your copyright more than 25 years ago — or if your parents did, for works they created — it is worth finding out whether the termination window is still open. The 5-year window moves. Once it closes, it's gone.

Second, "work made for hire" language in a contract is not automatically valid. If you weren't an employee and the work doesn't fit a statutory category, the label calling it a work for hire doesn't make it one. This is litigable — and Shabba Ranks is litigating it.

Third, the termination right cannot be waived in advance. No matter what you signed, that right survives. What you can lose is the window to exercise it. Which is why these cases keep going to court: the artists who missed their window have no recourse. The artists who catch it in time do.

Shabba Ranks caught it.

See you next time,

Hank

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About Hank's IP Brew

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