Book Deals Cost Supreme Court Its Quorum in Copyright Fight

Four Supreme Court justices recused themselves from a music copyright appeal this week, and the withdrawal left the Court without the six votes it needed to hear the case. The result: songwriter Cyril Vetter keeps full ownership of the 1962 song "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)." Courthouse News Service first reported the development on Monday.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson each stepped aside because they hold book deals with Penguin Random House. That publisher shares a parent company with BMG Rights Management, the record label that asked the Court to take the case.

The Constitution and the Court's own practice require six justices for a quorum. Five remained. That number fell short, so the lower court's judgment in Vetter's favor stands as the final word.

What did the fight over 'Double Shot' involve?

The dispute traces back to 2022. ABC sought permission to use the song on international broadcasts and streaming platforms. That request reopened the question of who controls the copyright to a track that has bounced through the music industry for more than six decades.

Two lower courts sided with Vetter. Both rulings allowed him to reclaim the copyright to "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)" in the United States and abroad. Vetter co-wrote the song, which the Swingin' Medallions made famous, and the courts found his termination claim valid under the ownership framework at issue.

BMG Rights Management, the losing petitioner, pressed the Supreme Court to intervene. The label argued the lower court rulings upset long-standing industry norms on publishing rights. It also warned the decisions would create confusion across the market for catalog ownership and licensing.

With the quorum failure, those arguments now go unanswered at the Supreme Court level. The appellate judgment stands without any merit review by the nation's highest court.

Why did four justices sit out?

The recusals flowed from a single commercial relationship. Penguin Random House publishes books by Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Barrett and Jackson. Bertelsmann, the German media group, counts both Penguin Random House and BMG Rights Management within its corporate family. Under the Court's disqualification practice, that shared parentage created a conflict sufficient to require each justice's withdrawal.

Individually, each recusal looks routine. Collectively, they removed a third of the bench from a case with broad commercial stakes, and the arithmetic consequence was decisive: five justices remained, one short of a quorum, and a lower court's judgment became the law of the case by default rather than by Supreme Court review.

The episode marks a rare public demonstration of how concentrated corporate ownership can ripple into the judiciary. When one conglomerate touches the finances of multiple justices and also backs a litigant, the recusal rules operate in series rather than in parallel.

What did Fix the Court say?

The watchdog group Fix the Court seized on the episode to renew its call for changes to the justices' recusal practices. The group said the current justices have earned more than $13 million combined from book deals.

"Today's recusals make clear that the Supreme Court's current disqualification standards need review," said Gabe Roth, Fix the Court's executive director, in a statement.

Roth went further in the same statement, addressing the structural consequence of the quorum failure. "Where the lack of a quorum means a lower court's judgment is affirmed," he said, "the Supreme Court is no longer supreme."

The criticism targets a gap in the Court's self-policing framework. Justices decide their own recusal motions with no external review, and no substitute mechanism exists when recusals strip the bench below a quorum.

What does this mean for practitioners?

For copyright and media lawyers, the immediate practical effect is straightforward. The appellate rulings granting Vetter full ownership of "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)" nationwide and internationally now stand without further challenge, and clients holding catalog rights secured through similar chains should re-examine termination and reversion exposure in light of the affirmed reasoning.

For appellate practitioners, the case is a caution flag on certiorari strategy. Petitioners facing a party with corporate ties to major publishers must now weigh quorum risk as a threshold question before investing in a petition, since four sitting justices hold Penguin Random House deals and any future litigant connected to that corporate family faces the same arithmetic that defeated BMG.

Does this put recusal rules back on the agenda?

The episode gives recusal reform advocates their most concrete illustration in years. A watchdog group, a precise dollar figure — more than $13 million in combined book earnings — and a case resolved by default rather than decision make for a potent combination in congressional letters and commentary pages.

The Court itself has shown little appetite for changing its recusal practices in the past. Whether Monday's quorum failure, with a named song, a named songwriter and a named publisher at its center, changes that calculation remains an open question.

For now, the operative fact is simpler. Vetter owns the song. The Supreme Court never ruled on whether he should.