Entertainment & Media

Music is built on copyrights and contracts, and if you sign the wrong deal you can spend a career watching someone else collect on your work. Hank has represented recording artists, songwriters, producers, and the businesses around them, pairing copyright depth with the courtroom experience these disputes demand.

Every song carries two separate copyrights, the musical composition the songwriter and publisher control, and the sound recording, the master, the label controls. They are licensed through different channels and generate different royalties, mechanical and performance income on the composition, master-use and neighboring rights on the recording, so Hank confirms who owns each before any money changes hands. When you sample another recording, both the composition and the sound recording have to be cleared, because an uncleared sample is copyright infringement, and through settlement or litigation the owner of the sampled work can take a share of your new song or block its release.

Your agreements determine how the money splits and who keeps control. Hank drafts and negotiates publishing and co-publishing deals, producer agreements and the points and credits that come with them, recording and distribution agreements, management and booking terms, live performance contracts, and the endorsement and synchronization licenses that place a song in an audiovisual work, such as an advertisement, a film, or a video game. On every deal he reads the chain of title first, because a deal is only worth what the seller owns, and reversion, termination, and audit rights determine whether you can take the catalog back later.

Hank has worked with artists at the start of a career and established names protecting a catalog, with producers and writers chasing unpaid royalties, and with companies licensing music for commercial use. Every engagement works toward the same result, ownership of what you created, licenses on terms you can live with, and the standing to enforce both.