One of the music industry’s most consequential copyright battles just got significantly more support behind it.
Irving Azoff’s Music Artists Coalition (MAC) filed an amicus brief Tuesday (April 7) in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals backing Salt-N-Pepa in their appeal against Universal Music Group over the duo’s right to reclaim master recordings from their 1986 catalog. The brief was joined by writer advocacy group Authors Alliance and legal organization Public Knowledge. A separate amicus brief was simultaneously filed by the National Society of Entertainment & Arts Lawyers (NSEAL).
The case centers on one of the most important and contested mechanisms in US copyright law: the termination right. Under Section 203 of the 1976 Copyright Act, artists can reclaim their intellectual property 35 years after signing it away, regardless of what the original contract said. Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandra “Pepa” Denton exercised that right in 2022, serving UMG with a notice of termination covering recordings going back to 1986. UMG refused to honor it. The duo filed suit in May 2025, arguing the label was holding their catalog “hostage.”
In January 2026, US District Judge Jeannette Vargas dismissed the case. The ruling turned on a technical but far-reaching point: because the 1986 contracts with Next Plateau Records, now absorbed by UMG, were executed by their producer Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor rather than James and Denton directly, the judge found the duo was not a party to the agreements and therefore had no termination rights to exercise. Salt-N-Pepa appealed, calling the dismissal “riddled with error.”
MAC’s amicus brief argues that the lower court’s reasoning creates a blueprint for labels to permanently circumvent the termination right. “By transferring rights to a new entity and ensuring an author is neither a party to nor an executor of the new grant, publishers and distributors can entirely insulate themselves from an author’s enforcement of statutory termination rights,” the brief states. “Accepting such a rule would render decades of negotiation and eventual compromise between authors and distributors entirely meaningless, nullifying the hard-won protections the 1976 Copyright Act affords authors.”
MAC, founded by Azoff in 2019 alongside Don Henley, Dave Matthews, Anderson .Paak, and other artists, frames the stakes in explicitly historical terms. The brief notes that Bob Dylan received only a $100 advance on his first publishing deal in 1962, and Bruce Springsteen signed away his entire catalog to a manager for just 3% of royalties in 1972. Congress created the termination right precisely because early-career artists lack leverage, the brief argues, and the Second Circuit should not interpret the law in a way that makes that protection easy to engineer around.
The NSEAL brief approaches the case from a different but complementary angle, focusing on the “work for hire” exception. Under copyright law, work created in the scope of employment is ineligible for termination. While the lower court did not explicitly invoke this doctrine in its ruling, NSEAL argues the decision implicitly treated Salt-N-Pepa’s 1986 recordings as works made for hire without any factual development or legal explanation, which the brief calls “reversible error” requiring remand.
Salt-N-Pepa’s attorney Richard Busch praised both filings. “That these amazing groups of the top people in the industry filed these amicus briefs speaks volumes not only to the strength of this appeal but to its importance to all artists in the music industry,” he said in a statement to Billboard.
The case connects directly to the broader federal court fight over songwriters’ rights to reclaim worldwide copyright and the ongoing tension between major labels and artists over catalog ownership. UMG did not respond to a request for comment. The company’s own appellate brief is due next month
