Universal Music Group is pushing back against Salt-N-Pepa’s attempt to reclaim ownership of their master recordings, telling a federal appeals court that the duo’s lawsuit has “foundational deficiency.”
According to a brief filed Tuesday (May 5) with the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals (read here), UMG urged the court to uphold a January ruling that dismissed the case brought by Salt-N-Pepa’s Cheryl James and Sandra Denton.
The hip-hop duo sued UMG in May 2025, alleging the music company prevented them from reclaiming ownership of their master recordings, in breach of US copyright laws.
The lawsuit was dismissed in January, with Judge Denise Cote of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York ruling that the artists never owned the copyrights to their sound recordings and therefore cannot reclaim them.
By February, the duo filed a notice of appeal against the dismissal of their lawsuit, and about a month ago, they filed an opening appellate brief, arguing that the district court applied the wrong legal standard when analyzing whether the duo had transferred their copyrights.
The brief, which you can read in full here, stated that the court “created a new requirement out of whole cloth” by asking whether Salt-N-Pepa had expressly “asserted their ownership of the copyrights” within the agreements. Under the Copyright Act, the brief argues, copyrights vest automatically in an author once a work is fixed in a tangible form. No formal assertion is needed.
“Salt-N-Pepa have no such requirement under the law to ‘assert their ownership’ of the copyrights,” the March 31 filing stated.
The main issue is whether Salt-N-Pepa ever actually signed away their copyrights in the first place. Judge Cote in January found that they did not.
The decision centered on three agreements signed on May 15, 1986. Salt-N-Pepa entered a recording deal with Noise In The Attic Productions, Inc. (NITA), a company controlled by their producer Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor. That same day, Azor separately signed a distribution agreement with Next Plateau Records, which was later absorbed by UMG, and the duo signed an inducement letter addressed to Next Plateau Records.
Under the recording agreement, NITA held “sole and exclusive” ownership of the masters and their copyrights. Azor then transferred those rights directly to Next Plateau.
Judge Cote concluded in January: “It was only Azor and NITA that granted a transfer of rights in 1986 to Next Plateau Records,” not Salt-N-Pepa themselves.
Salt-N-Pepa appealed that decision, arguing the ruling contradicted Congress’ “stated intent to provide safeguards to artists.”
Irving Azoff‘s Music Artists Coalition filed an amicus brief in support of the duo’s position, alongside Authors Alliance. They argued that Judge Cote’s decision renders the Congress’ protections “illusory” by allowing distributors to evade the law “simply by forcing authors, who occupy an inherently unfair bargaining position, to sign agreements that allegedly disavow ownership and then by executing subsequent grants that do not involve the authors.”
“While Plaintiffs and their amici emphasize the congressional policy to give authors a second chance to capture the value of their creative works through a termination right, they ignore the extent to which the entire termination provision is itself a carefully balanced scheme that also places important limitations on when and how the right may be exercised.”
Universal Music Group’s brief
Most recently, UMG’s response rejected that argument, writing: “While Plaintiffs and their amici emphasize the congressional policy to give authors a second chance to capture the value of their creative works through a termination right, they ignore the extent to which the entire termination provision is itself a carefully balanced scheme that also places important limitations on when and how the right may be exercised.”
“Judge Cote correctly found that the present case falls clearly outside the scope of any termination right created by Congress.”
Salt-N-Pepa’s argument also pointed to an “inducement letter” that they signed, in which they agreed to “grant you all of the rights and remedies therein granted to you.” The letter, according to the duo, constituted their direct grant of rights to Next Plateau.
Judge Cote disagreed and UMG, in its latest brief, said the inducement letter “does not contain or refer to any grant of copyright rights.”
UMG’s lawyers wrote: “Instead, Plaintiffs in their individual capacities made and guaranteed all of Producer’s warranties, representations and covenants in the Next Plateau Agreement, which would necessarily include Producer’s warranty and representation that Plaintiffs were employed by Producer under a valid and enforceable agreement, and that Next Plateau would be the legal ‘owner and author’ of all Sound Recordings created pursuant to the Next Plateau Agreement ‘from the inception of their creation,’ free of any claims whatsoever by Plaintiffs or Producer.”
“Plaintiffs thus allege a paradox,” UMG’s brief said, that the duo agreed Next Plateau was the recordings’ author and copyright owner, while also making a copyright grant to Next Plateau as the authors of the same sound recordings.
The battle between Salt-N-Pepa and UMG comes as a number of labels and artists are locked in legal battles over termination rights, which allow creators to claw back ownership of their work.
As MBW previously reported, under the US Copyright Act of 1976, the original author(s) of a song can “take back” their copyright from a publisher (or whoever they assigned the rights to) after a set period of time. For works written in 1978 or later, that term is 35 years. For works from before 1978, it’s 56 years.
In a landmark ruling in January, a federal appeals court ruled that songwriters can use US copyright law to reclaim their songs worldwide, not just in the US. The Fifth Circuit ruled that songwriter Cyril Vetter can take back full global control of Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love), a 1963 rock song, from publisher Resnik Music Group. The three-judge panel affirmed an earlier ruling that Vetter and Vetter Communications Corporation are the sole worldwide owners of the copyright.
In March, Capitol CMG, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing, BMG Rights Management and Essential Music Publishing filed a motion in the US Middle District of Louisiana asking the court to substitute them as defendants in place of Robert Resnik, who sold his asserted 25% stake in Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love) to the publishers on March 20.
They acquired the copyright interest as they seek to ask the Supreme Court to review the Fifth Circuit’s January ruling.
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