What to do when a collaborator won’t sign
17 · · 10 min read · Español
A refusal does not un-write the song. Copyright vested the moment the song existed, the law’s default already allocated it between everyone who wrote it, and no signature is needed for that default to govern. So the question is not how to make somebody sign. It is what you can do without them — and that depends on which refusal you have, and on which side of the border the song lives.
- In the United States, joint authors own equal undivided shares by default, regardless of who contributed what. An unsigned split sheet does not change that allocation.
- A US co-owner can release the song and grant non-exclusive licences alone, owing the other writers an accounting for their share of the profits.
- An exclusive licence needs every co-owner, and a transfer of ownership needs a writing signed by the owner of the rights being transferred.
- In Canada the default reverses: licensing a jointly owned song generally requires the consent of all the joint owners, so one refusal blocks it.
- Registering your own numbers over a live disagreement creates a conflicting claim. ASCAP and The MLC hold royalties on a disputed share, and BMI will not change its records without written confirmation from everyone affected.
Which refusal are you actually looking at?
Three situations look identical from your side of the conversation and are not: a stall, a silence, and a dispute.
- A stall is a collaborator who agrees with the numbers and has not signed the paper. That is logistics.
- A silence is a collaborator you cannot reach at all. That is bookkeeping: document what you tried.
- A dispute is a collaborator who says the numbers are wrong, or that they wrote more of the song than you think. That is legal, and the only one of the three you should not handle alone.
Sort that first. Treating a dispute as a stall means chasing a signature that was never coming; treating a stall as a dispute means paying a lawyer to solve a calendar problem.
Most of them are stalls. Achilles walked away from a war over a disputed share of the spoils; your co-writer has walked away from a PDF. They are on tour, or the file opens badly on a phone, or they decided that anything with the word agreement in it should be read carefully later, and later has been eleven weeks.
What do you own while nothing is signed?
In the United States, joint authors are co-owners of the copyright in equal undivided shares by default, however unequal the contributions were.
That default comes from the statute — 17 U.S.C. § 201(a) vests copyright in the authors of a work and makes the authors of a joint work co-owners of it — and the courts filled in the arithmetic. The Second Circuit put it in one sentence in Thomson v. Larson: joint authorship entitles the co-authors to equal undivided interests in the whole work, each free to use or license it, subject only to the obligation to account to the others for any profits.
A split sheet records an agreement that replaces that default. It does not create the split. What makes someone a co-writer at all, and what the default costs when nobody papered it, is what happens if you never signed a split sheet.
Which reframes the thing on your desk. The unsigned sheet is not a hole in your ownership. It is a hole in your evidence, and those two get confused at speed.
What can you do without their signature?
In the United States a co-owner can release the song and grant non-exclusive licences to the whole of it alone, owing the other writers an accounting for their share of the profits.
The accounting half of that rule is old and settled — Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. v. Jerry Vogel Music Co. awarded a co-owner an accounting of the proceeds another had taken from exploiting the copyright — and the Second Circuit restated the whole of it in Davis v. Blige: a co-owner who exploits the work needs no permission and owes an account. Put the record out. Pay them their share when it lands.
Three things that same rule will not stretch to cover:
- An exclusive licence needs every co-owner. One writer cannot grant it alone, because granting it would strip the others of a right they hold.
- A transfer of ownership needs a signed writing. Section 204(a) is explicit: a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed. No signature, no transfer, whatever anybody remembers agreeing.
- Reducing somebody’s registered share needs documentation. BMI’s own instructions for updating registered works require it before a share comes down — written authorization from every participant affected, or a court order.
And if the person refusing is a producer or a session player handed an assignment rather than a split sheet, stop reading. That is the master side, and it runs on rules of its own.
What changes in Canada?
The default reverses. On the general Canadian position, set out by Bereskin & Parr, a co-owner of a jointly authored work cannot publish, reproduce, transfer or license it without the consent of all the other co-owners.
So the same missing signature is an inconvenience in one country and a lock on the door in the other. In the US a refusal costs you the exclusive deals and nothing else; in Canada it costs you the ability to license the song at all. And a collaborator who has simply vanished does exactly as much damage as one who is angry with you, which is the part nobody expects.
If your writers are in different countries, which rule applies is genuinely not obvious, and that question belongs to a lawyer rather than to a blog post.
What happens if you register your own numbers anyway?
Filing your version of the split over a live disagreement creates a conflicting claim, and the money stops instead of arriving.
Start with what your filing will not achieve. BMI’s royalty policy manual says that where a later registration conflicts with an earlier one, BMI notifies the party who filed it and requests documentation or written confirmation from all affected participants before changing its records. Your numbers do not take effect. They queue behind the signature you did not get.
Then what it costs. ASCAP’s Compendium lets it hold royalties attributable to a disputed interest, where it concludes there is a reasonable basis for the claim, for as long as ASCAP deems appropriate. The MLC’s dispute policy puts the royalties for a disputed share into suspense — accrued and held — until the dispute resolves.
Read the shape of that. The hold is not aimed at whoever filed wrongly, because nobody at a society knows who that is. It lands on the work — your share too, and the share of every writer on the song who did nothing at all.
Backdating does not rescue it either. In Davis v. Blige the Second Circuit refused to let one co-owner’s retroactive paperwork wipe out claims that had already accrued to somebody else. If the split is already registered and you are trying to move it properly, that is a different job with its own order of operations: how to change a split after the song is released.
A conflicting registration does not win the argument. It takes the whole song’s money hostage until somebody produces paper. Go and get the fucking signature instead.
How do you get to a signature, and when do you stop trying?
Make the ask small: one page, the numbers already discussed, signed on paper — and set yourself a date to stop asking.
Small is the operative word, and thoroughness is how people get it wrong. Do not send a discussion. Send the sheet, filled in, shares already written where they go, so the only task left is a signature and a date. The split sheet template is on this site, ungated, and prints on one page for exactly this reason.
Then write down what you did. An email stating the shares and asking for confirmation is not a signature, but it is dated and contemporaneous, and if they go quiet it is the entire asset you are building. Years later it is also most of what a reconstruction has to work with.
Set the deadline while you are calm, because the version of you three months into silence will not set one. When it arrives, stop chasing and act on the default: release under the US rule if that is where you are, hold if you are in Canada, account for their share either way.
Stop self-helping at two signals. The first is a claim about authorship — someone saying they wrote more than you have credited them for. That argument has a real legal test behind it, requiring both a shared intent to be joint authors and an independently copyrightable contribution (Childress v. Taylor), and it is not a test to run on your own. The second is money accruing while nothing is signed.
Send the one-pager today, put the date in your calendar, and sign the next one at the session. That version of this problem never happens.
FAQ
Can you release a song if a co-writer won’t sign the split sheet?
In the United States, yes. Any co-owner can grant a non-exclusive licence to the whole song without asking, owing the others their share of the profits. In Canada, licensing a jointly owned song generally needs every co-owner’s consent.
Does the split exist if nothing is signed?
Yes. The law allocated ownership when the song was written — in the United States, equal undivided shares between joint authors regardless of who contributed what. A split sheet records an agreement that replaces the default; it does not create the split.
Can you register the song with the split you believe is right?
You can file it, and over a live disagreement it will be read as a conflicting claim. BMI will not change its records without written confirmation from everyone affected, and ASCAP and The MLC hold the royalties on a disputed share, so the filing freezes the money instead of settling anything.
What if the collaborator is not refusing, just gone?
Document your attempts in writing and leave their share intact. In the United States you can proceed non-exclusively while owing them an accounting; in Canada an unreachable co-owner generally blocks licensing until they are found.
Sources
- US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 201 — copyright vesting in the authors, and the authors of a joint work as co-owners of the copyright in it.
- US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 204(a) — a transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed.
- Thomson v. Larson, 147 F.3d 195 (2d Cir. 1998) — joint authorship entitling the co-authors to equal undivided interests in the whole work, each free to use or license it subject to the obligation to account.
- Shapiro, Bernstein & Co. v. Jerry Vogel Music Co., 221 F.2d 569 (2d Cir. 1955) — a co-owner’s entitlement to an accounting of the proceeds another took from exploiting the copyright.
- Davis v. Blige, 505 F.3d 90 (2d Cir. 2007) — unilateral non-exclusive licensing, the duty to account, and the refusal to let retroactive transfers extinguish accrued claims.
- Childress v. Taylor, 945 F.2d 500 (2d Cir. 1991) — the shared-intent requirement and the independently copyrightable contribution, which is the test behind any authorship claim.
- Bereskin & Parr, joint authorship and copyright co-ownership agreements (12 November 2021, republished on Mondaq) — the general position that a co-owner cannot publish, reproduce, transfer or license the work without the consent of all other co-owners.
- BMI, Updating registered works — amending an existing registration rather than re-registering, and the documentation required before a writer’s share is reduced.
- BMI, Royalty Policy Manual — a later registration that conflicts with an earlier one, and the confirmation required from all affected participants before BMI changes its records.
- ASCAP, Compendium of Rules and Regulations — holding disputed royalties where there is a reasonable basis for a claim, for as long as ASCAP considers appropriate.
- The MLC, Dispute Policy Statement (musical works ownership) — suspension of the disputed share while an ownership conflict is open.
This is not legal advice, and copyright co-ownership is one of the areas where the answer genuinely changes by country and by circuit. The US position here is the federal one; organization processes change, and the linked pages are the living documents. If real money or a real disagreement is involved, talk to a lawyer in the relevant territory before you file anything.
Keeping the register
What makes this survivable is knowing, on any given day, who has confirmed and who has not — a register problem, and what CatalogTracker keeps. Master and publishing splits sit per track with a status of their own: Draft, Pending, Ready, Confirmed. Splits are shared for confirmation by email, each collaborator confirms or rejects in their own inbox, and a rejection marks the split disputed rather than leaving it looking finished. Two honest limits, because they matter here more than anywhere: confirmation is a cryptographic attestation from a device, not an e-signature and not proof of identity — the app says so itself — and sharing needs an account and a network connection. It will not make anybody sign. It will make it impossible to lose track of who has not. In development for iPhone.