The US Supreme Court disposed of BMG Rights Management (US) LLC v. Vetter, No. 25-1391, on 19 October 2026 without deciding anything. The docket entry records that because the Court “lacks a quorum” under 28 U.S.C. §1, and the qualified Justices concluded the case could not be heard and determined at the next Term, the judgment below was affirmed under 28 U.S.C. §2109 — which directs an affirmance “with the same effect as upon affirmance by an equally divided court.” Justices Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett and Jackson took no part in considering or deciding the petition, leaving five. The order gives no reasons for the recusals; the European Commission’s IP Helpdesk reports they arise from the Justices’ own book-publishing arrangements with a company in the same group as a petitioner. The petition, filed by Capitol CMG, Essential Music Publishing, Warner-Tamerlane Publishing and BMG Rights Management and argued on the papers by Paul Clement, had been distributed for the conference of 16 October and drew supporting amicus briefs from Paramount Pictures, the Motion Picture Association, the RIAA, the IFPI and a group of IP law professors.
What survives is the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Vetter v. Resnik, No. 25-30108, decided 12 January 2026 (reported at 163 F.4th 951), which affirmed the Middle District of Louisiana in full. Cyril Vetter and Donald Smith wrote “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” in Baton Rouge in 1962 and assigned one hundred percent of their interests to Windsong Music Publishers the following year — worldwide, for the full term, for one dollar. Vetter served a §304(c) termination notice in March 2019 effective 3 May 2022; separately, his company had bought the renewal interest that passed to Smith’s heirs after Smith died in a 1972 plane crash. Writing for a panel of Smith, Stewart and Ramirez, Judge Stewart held that §304(c)(6)(E) — termination “affects only those rights covered by the grant that arise under this title, and in no way affects rights arising under any other Federal, State, or foreign laws” — carries no geographic limit. Vetter’s rights arose under Title 17, so terminating recaptured them everywhere, not merely in the United States. The renewal interest was held to be a new estate under the 1909 Act with no territorial ceiling either. The court declined to follow the leading authorities the other way — Siegel v. Warner Bros., the Superman case, and the unpublished Clancy v. Jack Ryan Enterprises — and held that Nimmer’s contrary view is “contrary to statutory text, context, and purpose.” Berne national treatment was satisfied, it reasoned, because the right was recognised abroad in the first place by treaty; and the presumption against extraterritoriality was inapplicable because this case concerns ownership, not infringement.
What this changes
Start with what the Supreme Court did not do. A §2109 affirmance has the effect of an equally divided Court: it resolves the parties’ dispute and creates no national precedent. So the practical map is now genuinely split. In Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, a §304(c) termination recaptures worldwide exploitation rights. In the districts that produced Siegel and Clancy, and in the circuits where the recorded music, film and publishing industries actually sit, the older domestic-only reading is still what a court is likely to apply. The question presented is live and unresolved, and the next circuit to reach it writes the next chapter.
That turns scope into a venue problem. Until now, the geographic reach of a termination was treated as settled background; it is now a contested issue whose answer may depend on which district hears the declaratory judgment action. Anyone drafting or renegotiating a grant should stop treating the forum and venue clause as boilerplate — it is a substantive allocation of termination risk. Anyone on either side of a dispute that is already warm should assume the other party has noticed that too, and that filing first somewhere favourable is a cheap option.
The second point is the one most easily missed: this is not a problem confined to 1960s catalogues. §203(b)(5), which governs grants executed on or after 1 January 1978, contains the identical sentence about rights arising under “any other Federal, State, or foreign laws.” The Fifth Circuit’s reading of that language in §304(c)(6)(E) applies with equal force to the modern provision. The §203 wave is already running — the earliest post-1978 grants passed their 35-year mark more than a decade ago — and because notice must be served well in advance, the terminations that will land in the early 2030s are being served now.
Which makes the clocks the actual deliverable. Under §304(c)(3), the window is five years beginning at the end of 56 years from the date copyright was originally secured. Under §203(a)(3), it is five years beginning at the end of 35 years from execution of the grant — or, where the grant covers the right of publication, 35 years from publication or 40 years from execution, whichever ends earlier. In both, the notice must be served not less than two nor more than ten years before the stated effective date, and a copy must be recorded in the Copyright Office before the effective date as a condition of its taking effect. Nothing renews automatically and no registry sends a reminder: these dates live inside agreements, which is exactly where deadlines go to be forgotten. If your termination windows are tracked in a spreadsheet rather than a docket, that is now a quantifiable exposure — contract and obligation management is the unglamorous fix.
Diligence changes shape too. The renewal half of this case turned on a death — Smith died before the renewal term vested, so his heirs took a fresh estate that his 1963 signature could not reach, and Vetter’s company bought it in 1996. For pre-1978 works, a chain-of-title review that captures only signatures and assignment dates will miss the answer; it has to capture when each author died relative to renewal vesting, and who took the renewal interest. On the buy side of a catalogue, the petitioners’ own filing made the commercial case plainly: the industry is negotiating deals running through 2072, and ownership uncertainty makes them harder to price. Expect specific representations about notices served and recorded, about whether worldwide scope is warranted, and about holdbacks against foreign revenue — the kind of question a monetization and valuation review should now be asked to answer explicitly rather than assume.
Two limits are worth holding onto. A US declaratory judgment settles ownership between the parties before that court; it does not bind foreign registries, collecting societies or sub-publishers, and making it stick in each territory remains a question of local recognition and enforcement. And the Fifth Circuit was careful that it was deciding ownership and assignment, not infringement — it distinguished the extraterritoriality line of cases on exactly that ground. Nothing here extends the reach of a US infringement claim one inch beyond the border. What it extends is the reach of a signature, and of the statute that lets an author take it back.
Reported by PerspireIP from the Supreme Court docket in No. 25-1391, the Fifth Circuit’s opinion in Vetter v. Resnik (No. 25-30108), the text of 17 U.S.C. §§203 and 304, and contemporaneous reporting by IPWatchdog and the European Commission’s IP Helpdesk.