Hank's IP Brew — Issue #34

Howdy, y'all.

This week: Oasis just sued their former sound engineer to stop a £1.6 million auction of tapes he made at the mixing desk — and the legal question at the center of it applies to every creator who's ever hired someone to record them. And the NCAA won a significant court battle over whether athletes who graduated in 2022 are entitled to a fifth year of eligibility.

Let's get into it.

On September 29, Oasis filed suit in London's High Court against Owain Richards — the son of the band's former front-of-house sound engineer — and Littleton Auctions, days before a planned October 3 sale of what the auction house had described as "the only master archive of its kind in existence."

The collection, known as The Desk Tapes, spans 209 DAT tapes, 73 analogue cassettes, and three MiniDiscs. It covers 63 live concert recordings, soundchecks, more than 100 hours of rehearsals, and what reports describe as "unfiltered dialogue" between Noel and Liam Gallagher. The archive was assembled by Huw Richards, who joined the Oasis crew in 1995 and served as the band's front-of-house sound engineer until 2001 — covering the Knebworth shows in August 1996 and much of the band's commercial peak. Littleton had priced the lot at £1.2 million to £1.6 million. Owain Richards described the collection to The Times as "a piece of history."

The auction house pulled the lot immediately. Owain Richards confirmed the suit and agreed to postpone the sale. Oasis has not commented publicly. The claimants named include Oasis, Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, and Sony Music Entertainment UK.

The auction house's managing director framed it simply: "We are very disappointed that we cannot offer this significant archive as planned."

The legal question that makes this matter for creators

The details of the claim haven't been made public yet — the London proceedings are still under wraps — but the core dispute is visible in how the parties have talked about the tapes.

Owain Richards told the BBC: "Oasis have sued me and my father to try to prevent the auction of the tapes made by my father many years ago." Emphasis on made by my father — the framing of a person who believes that making a recording confers some ownership in it.

The Guardian reported a telling detail: Owain Richards himself acknowledged that even if a buyer purchased the tapes, they couldn't release the recordings without Oasis's cooperation, because "Oasis retained the intellectual property rights." He said this in September, weeks before the lawsuit. He seemed to believe the physical tapes were his to sell even while acknowledging the band owned the recordings' IP — a distinction that, at best, leaves any buyer with a very expensive object they can't do much with.

That gap — between owning the physical medium and owning the intellectual property in the performance — is exactly what the lawsuit will likely turn on.

Who owns a recording made by a crew member?

In most common law jurisdictions, including the UK and the US, the default rule is that the person who creates a work owns the copyright in it. A sound engineer who records a live performance from the mixing desk has, in a technical sense, created a recording. That could give rise to a copyright claim in the recording itself, separate from the band's copyright in the underlying musical performance.

But there are significant limits on that theory. The Oasis performances captured on those tapes are copyrighted by Oasis. The tapes can't be exploited commercially without the band's permission regardless of who "owns" the physical recordings or the engineer's copyright interest in the mix. And if Huw Richards was working as an employee of the tour organization — or under a contract that assigned his work product — the question of his copyright in the recordings may be more complicated still.

The more practical question for anyone who hires a crew member, photographer, videographer, or audio engineer is simpler: what did the contract say?

If it said nothing — or if there was no contract — the default rules apply, and the default rules vary by jurisdiction and by the nature of the relationship. In the US, an independent contractor generally retains copyright in their work unless there's a written agreement to the contrary. In the UK, the rules differ between employees and contractors. The practical result in many cases is that the person holding the camera or the mixing board has a colorable claim to some IP interest in what they captured — unless the contract specifically addressed it.

Oasis spent decades as one of the most commercially powerful bands in the world. Their tours almost certainly came with standard crew agreements. What those agreements said about recordings made at the board is presumably what this lawsuit will ultimately hinge on.

What creators should do with this

The Oasis case is extreme — 100 hours of archived recordings, a £1.6 million auction price, the Gallagher brothers' names attached. But the underlying problem is ordinary. It happens every time a creator:

In each case, the creator may assume they own the output because they paid for it. They may be wrong. Payment for services is not the same as transfer of copyright. Unless the contract explicitly assigns the intellectual property — in writing, signed by both parties — the creator of the work retains copyright in most jurisdictions, regardless of who paid for it.

The fix is straightforward: any agreement with a creative contractor should include a work-for-hire clause (if the relationship and the type of work qualify under applicable law) and a copyright assignment clause that transfers all rights to the commissioning party. For ongoing relationships — a house photographer, a regular audio engineer — a standing agreement is better than negotiating it project by project.

Huw Richards spent years recording Oasis from the mixing desk. If his family is now trying to sell those recordings for seven figures, the answer to who actually owns them is somewhere in a contract — or in the absence of one.

On October 2, an Ohio appellate court handed the NCAA its first significant legal win in the Class of 2022 eligibility battles — a wave of lawsuits that have been working their way through state courts across the country since the NCAA changed its eligibility rules earlier this year.

Judge Candace Crouse of Ohio's First Appellate District reversed a lower court's preliminary injunction that had temporarily given 24 former athletes a potential pathway to a fifth year of collegiate competition. The lead plaintiff is former Xavier basketball player Filip Borovicanin. Twenty-three other former athletes were joined in the case, which had been brought with the support of the Texas Attorney General's Office.

The ruling is the first appellate decision to reach the merits of the Class of 2022 cases — and it went squarely in the NCAA's favor.

What the Class of 2022 cases are about

The dispute stems from an NCAA policy adopted in June 2026 creating what it calls a "five-years-to-play-five-seasons" model for current and future athletes. The new policy effectively gives incoming athletes more flexibility — five full seasons to use across a five-year enrollment window, with COVID extensions and other adjustments baked in.

Athletes who graduated high school and entered college in 2022 were not included in the new framework. They operate under the old rule: four seasons of competition within a five-year window. Having played their four seasons, they're done — even as athletes who enrolled a year later may have more flexibility.

The plaintiffs in cases like Borovicanin's argued that was unfair and arguably a breach of contract — that they had a legitimate expectation of benefits under the new framework that the NCAA was wrongly denying them. Courts in multiple states initially agreed, issuing preliminary injunctions that temporarily allowed some former athletes to suit up while the cases were litigated.

The Ohio appellate decision is the first to push back on that view at the appellate level.

What the court said

Judge Crouse was direct. The plaintiffs, she held, failed to show a substantial likelihood of succeeding on their breach of contract claims. The relevant NCAA bylaw — Bylaw 12.6 — was unambiguous: student-athletes who entered college in 2022 were entitled to four seasons of intercollegiate competition over a five-year period. That's what they received.

"The plaintiffs graduated high school and entered college in 2022," she wrote. "At the time that they began their college athletic careers, the NCAA Bylaws provided that they were entitled to participate in four seasons of intercollegiate competition over a five-year period."

She also made a structural observation that may have implications beyond this specific case. The proliferation of eligibility lawsuits — filed in Ohio, Louisiana, Kentucky, Colorado, South Carolina, and other states, producing inconsistent results across jurisdictions — is itself a problem. "It is certainly in the public's interest not to have piecemeal litigation in multiple courts across the country concerning whether certain players are eligible to participate in a fifth year of athletic competition," the court said. "It is arguably preferable to have a voluntary association interpret and apply its own rules for the sake of uniform enforcement and predictability."

That language is notable. It suggests an appellate court's impatience with the state-by-state eligibility injunction strategy — and signals that the NCAA's preference for a single uniform enforcement framework may find sympathy at higher court levels.

What it means practically

For the 24 athletes in the Borovicanin case, the immediate result is that the preliminary injunction is gone. Their potential pathway to a fifth season of eligibility has been closed, at least while the litigation continues on the merits.

More broadly, the Ohio ruling is the first appellate signal that the Class of 2022 cases may be harder to win than the initial wave of preliminary injunctions suggested. Courts that issue preliminary injunctions are not ruling on the ultimate merits — they're making a threshold determination that the plaintiff has a reasonable chance of winning and faces irreparable harm. An appellate court reversing that determination on the merits is a meaningful data point.

The litigation tracker still shows active cases in multiple states, with several preliminary injunction hearings ongoing and others on appeal. The NCAA has not won the eligibility wars — but it won a round that matters, at an appellate level, on the merits, for the first time.

For brands and advisors dealing with athlete eligibility questions: the takeaway is that the Class of 2022 claims are legally weaker than they initially appeared, and the uniform enforcement framework the NCAA prefers may be getting judicial sympathy. Any deal structure that depends on a specific athlete's fifth-year eligibility being secured through ongoing litigation carries more uncertainty than the initial injunction wave suggested.

See you next time,

Hank

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