Music Licensing: Tougher than Landing a Quadruple Axel? The Copyright Challenges Behind Olympic Figure Skating at the 2026 Winter Games

By Lilit Arakelyan, New York University School of Law, J.D., Class of 2027

I. Introduction

Alysa Liu’s 2026 Olympic gold medal performances not only had global audiences captivated by her skating, but also pushed her song choices to the top of the music charts, leading to Donna Summer’s “fourth posthumous No. 1.” 

The International Skating Union (ISU) first began allowing figure skaters to compete to music with lyrics like Liu’s viral performances to “MacArthur Park” and “Stateside” for singles and pair skating in 2014. The ISU’s rule change opened the door to mutual benefits for music artists, athletes, and viewership of Olympic figure skating alike, and could even lead to higher scores for the figure skaters—who are scored not only on their technical skills but also on how their programs are designed and performed in relation to the music. However, the change in the rules has since implicated copyright issues for athletes. Performing to copyrighted music without securing the necessary permissions can constitute copyright infringement, exposing the athlete—and the broadcasters of the performance—to potential lawsuits from the song’s rightsholders. 

In 2022, two U.S. Olympic figure skaters and the Olympic Games’ broadcasting networks were sued in a U.S. District Court for copyright infringement. Music duo Heavy Young Heathens alleged the athletes had not obtained permission to perform to their rendition of “House of the Rising Sun,” and the parties eventually settled the matter for an unconfirmed amount, though it was estimated to have settled for $1.4 million. During the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, the risk of copyright infringement liability prompted athletes to scramble for licensing approvals ahead of the most momentous performances of their careers, leading, in some cases, to the abandonment of established programs and last-minute substitutions of music. 

Obtaining permission to use a song within a geographically fragmented licensing regime made licensing music a nightmare for Olympic figure skaters this year. Clearing rights for just one rightsholder or the rightsholders of just one geographic region does not automatically secure them in another, and, as stated in the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Guidance for Athletes, athletes are responsible for “obtaining permission for 100% of the song/composition, across every country in the world.” 

This blog post highlights several of the challenges this year’s athletes encountered while securing the rights to perform to their chosen music, first exploring the background of the ISU’s rule change and why music choice matters to figure skaters, then a broad overview of copyrights and why clearing rights for a global event is especially complex, and lastly the historical development of the core ideas of copyright law, as well as difference across international frameworks, that underpin the tensions arising from the impermissible use of artists’ songs.

II. Background

Fears of litigation may have been stirred among members of U.S. Olympic figure skater Amber Glenn’s team after the artist behind the song she skated to during her free skate—Seb McKinnon—shared on X (formerly Twitter): “So just found out an Olympic figure skater used one of my songs without permission for their routine. It aired all over the world . . . what? Is that usual practice for the Olympics?” Notably, Glenn had performed to McKinnon’s “The Return” for two years by the time she performed it for her Olympic event.

When Licensing Issues Arose

Before 2014, figure skaters performed almost exclusively to classical music, the underlying compositions of which fall largely in the public domain and therefore do not typically require licensing for performance use. In 2014, the ISU changed its rules to allow athletes to perform to music with lyrics in an effort to appeal to younger audiences and modernize the sport. Until then, figure skaters didn’t worry about licensing issues. The decision may have transformed figure skating’s cultural reach, but walked the sport directly into one of the most fragmented fields in intellectual property law.

Troubles Experienced During the 2026 Olympic Games

While Glenn luckily escaped the potential costs of litigation despite performing to McKinnon’s song without securing permission, multiple figure skaters faced music licensing hiccups during the 2026 Winter Olympics season. Four days before his performance, Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté spent the day leading up to his event trying to clear the music for his “Minions” medley—a routine he had competed with all season under the belief that the rights had been properly cleared. Meanwhile, Russian figure skater Petr Gumennik, competing as an Individual Neutral Athlete, changed his short program just two days before his performance after failing to secure the necessary permissions for a program he had been performing to all season. A couple months before the games, Canadian skaters Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac were compelled to scrap their entire Prince program after their clearance fell through in December. Further, Belgian figure skater Loena Hendrickx was advised to choose a new Celine Dion song because her team worried that her original selection—featured in Deadpool 2—might present copyright complications. 

At least five (known) instances of music licensing issues emerged during the 2026 Winter Olympics season.

Why is Music Choice a Big Deal in Figure Skating?

Figure skating is a sport that demands artistic expression as a defining element. Athletes are evaluated not only on technical difficulty but also on composition—how the program is designed or built in relation to the music (i.e., choreography)—and presentation—how the program is performed in relation to the music (i.e., expressiveness of energy and movements). An Olympic blog post from last year provided a look into the diverse music powering the athletes behind the scenes. 

To highlight the significance of music choice for figure skating performances: Before taking the Olympic crown in the 2026 Olympic Games, Alysa Liu conditioned her return to competitive figure skating—after spending four years off the ice following her retirement in 2022—on being able to choose her own music. During an interview after this year’s Games, Liu said, “For me, the music carries my body. It tells me what to do.” 

During the interview, Liu further noted, “If I don’t have enough time to get from point A to point B—to land a jump on the crash or something, we will add in more music just so that I can.” Skating coach Mary Quigg echoed this, emphasizing that music choice shapes the figure skater’s entire program: “ . . . there are certain strategic parts and sections to put a jump or a spin, choreography, slow down, speed up. So you definitely will have to move some elements and pieces around with a new piece of music.” This makes situations like that of Gumennik’s—who competed with his program all season only to face last-minute licensing issues—particularly disruptive.

When asked if a “good routine” had ever been “ruined by a bad music selection,” Quigg responded, “Definitely . . . sometimes you have a really great skater, and you choose a bad piece of music that doesn’t highlight the skater’s strongest skating potential . . . [It] can definitely downplay what they’re capable of.”

III. The Complexities of Securing Permissions

While the artist in Amber Glenn’s case had the ability to approve licensing independently—stating in a since-deleted post, “The deal I have with my label is that I alone can give the ok to license my music”— typically, artists alone don’t control the rights to their music, having assigned them to others in the music industry, like their record labels and publishers. For an international stage like the Olympics, the number of people or entities an athlete must obtain permission from can multiply with the added layer of territorial considerations and differences in legal frameworks concerning artists’ moral rights.

A Simplified Overview of Copyright

In the United States, for example, copyright creates multiple exclusive rights, including, for example, the right to copy or reproduce the work, distribute copies of the work, and perform the work publicly. No one besides the owners of these rights is authorized to conduct those activities without the respective owner’s (or owners’) permission. However, songs often have multiple contributors, and the performing artist heard on a track may not own any part of it. A song can have a separate songwriter, lyricist, and producer—sometimes multiple of each—all of whom may hold rights depending on authorship and other arrangements made in contracts. 

Songs are divided into two components: (1) the composition and (2) the sound recording of the composition. Often, a songwriter or publisher often owns rights to a song’s composition, and a record label may own the rights to the sound recording. Unless the song is in the public domain, the IOC’s guidance requires athletes to acquire permission from the rightsholders of a song’s (1) publishing rights; (2) master rights in the recording; and (3) “performer rights.”

As characterized in the IOC’s guidance, “performer rights” are “the rights of the performers in the performances of the song/composition that is embodied in the sound recording,” and the guidance provides that a record label may have acquired this right. Separate from economic rights attached to the public performance of the song, however, some countries may recognize non-transferable “moral rights” in performers to protect how their works are presented in the public. Thus, where such rights are recognized, the unauthorized use of a song may potentially create additional liability if it infringes a performer’s moral rights.

Due to these considerations, when looking for the parties that own these rights, the aforementioned lists are non-exhaustive. Guarino Sabaté, for example, had to clear permission with Universal Pictures, with musician and producer Pharrell Williams, and, for one of the four cuts of music in his program, he ended up having to reach out to the artist directly. Only adding to the list of rightsholders to look out for, some high-profile artists have the bargaining power to negotiate deals with separate record labels in different geographic regions. The IOC’s Guidance also flagged the possibility of there being multiple publishers where there is more than one writer, who may each own rights in the song in different territories, and emphasized that athletes should “check carefully for all three sets of rights” and obtain permission for “100% of the song/composition, across every country in the world.”

Music Licensing Tools

Performing rights societies or organizations (PROs) generally simplify the music licensing process for businesses and venues that want to play copyrighted music. By pooling the rights of multiple rightsholders under a single license, PROs administer “blanket licenses,” where—in exchange for fees paid to the PRO—a business or venue can be cleared for the performing rights of any of the songs that the PRO has in its catalog. While venues for the Olympics may hold blanket licenses with a PRO, athletes remain individually responsible for obtaining licensing permissions to perform to their chosen music.

ClicknClear, a third-party licensing platform for choreographed sports that uses a similar model of “blanket agreements,” was purportedly the ISU’s recommended rights-clearance provider for the figure skaters. It was founded “to bridge the gap between music and sport, and enable teams and athletes access to music they love without the risk of legal action.” However, Guarino Sabaté had submitted his music to ClicknClear in August 2025, and, up until the days leading up to his performance, was under the false impression that he had successfully been cleared to use his “Minions” medley at the Olympic Games. Notably, after Guarino Sabaté’s struggles to finally acquire permission to use all of his program’s music, Universal Music Group (UMG), one of the “big three” record labels, signed an agreement with ClicknClear to license its catalog for athletes in figure skating and other choreographed sports, providing worldwide access to UMG’s catalog of music for their routines. 

IV. Tensions in International Copyright Laws

The international licensing problem is not just that there are too many owners to find, but that different legal systems answer different questions. 

Copyright law rests on two justifications that are usually complementary but not always identical in their implications. The first is utilitarian: In the United States, for example, to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” copyright law grants creators limited, exclusive rights as an incentive and reward—a mechanism for ensuring that creators can earn compensation from their work, which in theory will encourage more creation for the public benefit. The utilitarian approach is often traced back to England’s “Statute of Anne,” widely regarded as one of the first copyright laws. 

The second justification is rights-based, sometimes referred to as “moral rights”: The idea that creators have an inherent interest in the portrayal of their works and a personal connection to them. While the scope of these rights varies, they typically pertain to proper attribution for their works and maintaining artistic integrity by preventing “prejudicial distortions” of their work, as they “protect the personal and reputational, rather than purely monetary, value of a work to its creator.” The protection of these interests is often traced back to early French copyright law and the idea of “droit moral,” which translates to “moral rights.”

In the United States, moral rights protections are granted for visual works under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA), and otherwise enforced piecemeal through copyright, trademark, privacy, and defamation law. By contrast, some countries—particularly those in Europe—extend moral rights protection more broadly through ordinary copyright law, including sound recordings. They may recognize separate intellectual property rights for performers just “in their capacity as performers.” One example is the performers’ right under Australia’s Copyright Act, which offers a cause of action for the “unauthorised exploitation of the sound recording or film/video recording of a performance.”

Economic Rights

The Heavy Young Heathens lawsuit was framed primarily through economic harm. The duo alleged that the skaters’ and broadcasters’ use of their recording without permission was a “brazen and improper effort to capitalize on Plaintiff’s hard work and copyright ownership” and emphasized that the song was “a very valuable licensing asset.” That framing fits comfortably within the utilitarian themes of the U.S. copyright system in granting creators limited, exclusive rights as an incentive for production.

Generally, however, these exclusive rights may be transferred to others, and often are in the music industry. Identifying the creator is not always the same as identifying the legal owner or legal author whom the law protects. Heavy Young Heathens stated that they owned the relevant rights in their recording, but in traditional record deals, many musicians assign or license some or all of their economic rights to record labels, publishers, or other intermediaries. That is also why artists themselves may not always be able to authorize the use of their songs. Taylor Swift’s decision to re-record her earlier albums illustrates the point: even globally famous artists may not control the recordings of their own work, depending on the contracts governing those recordings. 

Yet, the reactions from both Heavy Young Heathens and Seb McKinnon also point to a different concern: not merely who was paid, but whether the artist was properly credited. What constitutes proper accreditation, as described below, introduces a schism in international copyright law between economic rights and “moral rights.”

Moral Rights

Heavy Young Heathens alleged that their song was used without any on-screen attribution crediting the artists: “ . . . while all other Olympic short program routines provided an on-screen chyron of the song title and artist(s) who perform the song . . . [the skaters’] performance simply stated ‘House Of The Rising Sun.’” 

Seb McKinnon’s initial reaction to learning of Amber Glenn’s performance to “The Return” followed a similar instinct—although McKinnon later expressed his congratulations and appreciation for Glenn’s performance, he also emphasized that creators deserve “clear consent, proper credit, and fair compensation.” The attribution concerns that the artists raised sound not only like ensuring proper compensation was received, but also a “moral rights” concern for creators regarding how their work is displayed to the public.

International copyright law reflects this divide. The Berne Convention’s Article 6bis recognizes authors’ moral rights explicitly, including the right to claim authorship and to object to distortions, mutilations, or other derogatory treatment of a work that would prejudice the author’s honor or reputation. Separately, international frameworks governing performances recognize that performers may hold rights in their performances apart from the copyright in the underlying composition or sound recording. The WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, for example, recognizes both economic rights of performers and performers’ moral rights, including rights of identification and integrity.

The distinction matters because, while economic rights can often be assigned, licensed, or otherwise controlled by contract, moral rights may be treated differently. In France, for example, authors and artists have multiple “moral rights” for “protecting the personality of the artist,” which includes the right to withdraw a work from public circulation, all of which are inalienable and imprescriptible, and will pass on to their heirs. More generally, French moral-rights doctrine treats the personal bond between creator and work as something that cannot be reduced entirely to a transferable and temporary economic asset.

That tension explains why the Heavy Young Heathens lawsuit and McKinnon’s reaction felt larger than a paperwork problem. The licensing failures during the 2026 Winter Olympics can be described as administrative breakdowns, but they also exposed a deeper conflict between two conceptions of copyright: one focused on marketable ownership and licensing, and another focused on the creator’s continuing personal connection to the work.

V. Conclusion

The licensing challenges faced by figure skaters during the 2026 Winter Olympic Games may be characterized as administrative failures, and in sum, the sense of frustration that there is “no global music ownership database or universal licensing system to connect music owners with users.” When the 2030 Winter Olympic Games approach, athletes and their teams can hope that the groundwork laid by this year’s athletes will mean the music plays without incident before the first skate hits the ice.