On July 7, 2026, All Surface Publishing, a U.S. music publisher, filed a federal copyright lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against HYBE — the Korean entertainment giant that is home to BTS — along with its U.S. arm HYBE America, the sublabel ADOR, and the five members of the chart-topping group NewJeans. The complaint alleges that NewJeans' 2023 hit "ETA" lifted its instrumental from an earlier composition that All Surface says it controls. The case is All Surface Publishing, Inc. v. HYBE Co., Ltd., No. 2:26-cv-07344. Beyond HYBE and the artists, the suit sweeps in the song's credited songwriters and producers and the web of companies that publish and distribute it — a defendant list that reads like a map of the modern music supply chain, reaching entities tied to Apple, UMG, Sony Music Publishing, Concord, Peermusic and more. The filing drew fast coverage from Billboard, Music Business Worldwide, Digital Music News, and the Korean press, where ADOR said it was reviewing its internal records in response — one of the more closely watched music filings on the IP Feed this summer.
What makes this one worth a second look is how ordinary the underlying claim is, and how tangled the object of it has become. The copyright fights that have dominated the IP Feed lately have mostly been about machines — labels and authors against AI systems trained on their work. This is the older kind of case: one songwriter's camp says another song copied theirs. But the thing being fought over is no longer a single sheet of music written by a single person. A global K-pop hit like "ETA" is assembled — topline, beat, arrangement, and production layered by a rotating cast of writers and producers across more than one company — and that assembly is exactly what makes ownership hard to pin down when someone claims a piece of it was theirs first.
What the lawsuit says
All Surface Publishing's theory, as reported, is narrow and specific: it says the instrumental bed of "ETA" — the beat and musical arrangement, not the vocal melody or lyrics — reproduces an earlier composition in which it holds the publishing rights. On that theory it has named not just NewJeans and their label but the full chain that carried the track to listeners: HYBE and HYBE America, ADOR, the individual members credited on the release, the songwriters and producers listed in the song's credits, and the publishers and distributors that administer and deliver it. That breadth is deliberate. In a music-copyright suit, a plaintiff typically reaches everyone who reproduced, distributed, or profited from the allegedly infringing work, because liability can attach at several links in the chain at once.
The defense has not yet been filed, and nothing has been decided. ADOR's public statement that it is reviewing internal records is the kind of response you would expect from a company confident it can document where its track came from — session files, split sheets, and the paper trail of who wrote what. HYBE has not conceded anything. The allegations are unproven, no court has ruled on similarity or ownership, and the roster of label and distributor defendants does not mean each one did anything wrong; it means the plaintiff has cast a wide net that discovery and motions will narrow. What follows is the legal question the filing raises, not a prediction of how it resolves.
The hard part: access, similarity, and who owns the beat
Music copyright cases turn on two questions that sound simple and almost never are. First, access: did the people who made "ETA" have a realistic opportunity to hear the earlier work? Second, substantial similarity: does what they produced actually copy protected expression, as opposed to the unprotectable building blocks — a common chord progression, a genre-standard drum pattern, a groove — that no one can own? Beat-driven pop makes both questions genuinely hard, because the very elements that make two tracks feel alike are often the ones the law treats as free for everyone to use. Courts and juries have split badly on exactly this line in recent years, which is why an instrumental-similarity claim is unpredictable even when the audio comparison sounds damning to a casual listener.
Sitting underneath the doctrine is a messier practical problem that has nothing to do with whether the songs sound alike: credit and provenance. When a hit is built by many hands across several companies, the question "who wrote this part, and who owns it?" is answered — or not — by the records made at the time. A split sheet signed in the room, a dated demo, a clear licensing trail for a sampled or interpolated element: these are what let a defendant say, with evidence, this is where our beat came from and here is our right to use it. Where those records are thin, ambiguous, or contradicted by a rival paper trail, a case that might have been dismissed early instead grinds through discovery, expert musicologists, and a fight over documents that should have been unambiguous years ago. This suit will be won or lost less on vibes than on whose chain of authorship is better documented.
Why it matters beyond one lawsuit
Strip away the K-pop wattage and the lesson is the one the IP Feed keeps returning to: a creative asset is only as defensible as your ability to prove what it is, who made it, and what rights travel with it. "ETA" is worth fighting over because it is enormously valuable — and that value now depends on a records question that predates the dispute by years. The side that can produce a clean, contemporaneous account of how the track was written will be in a far stronger position than the side reconstructing it after the fact.
For everyone downstream of a hit — the songwriters, the producers, the indie artists and filmmakers who license and build on other people's work — that is the double edge. The same music you want to clear for a sync, sample, or score is only safe to use if its ownership is actually settled, and "settled" means documented, not assumed. A film that licenses a track, a creator who interpolates a hook, a rights holder trying to collect on a catalog: each inherits whatever ambiguity was baked in upstream. The practical takeaway is unglamorous and permanent. Keep the split sheets. Date the demos. Record who contributed what, and under which rights, while everyone still remembers — because when a valuable work gets challenged, the party with the provable chain of ownership is the one still standing when the musicology reports come in.
We'll track this docket as it develops. The first real signals will come as HYBE and its co-defendants answer — whether they contest access, dispute that any protected expression was copied, or produce documentation of the beat's origins — and as the court begins sorting which of the many named defendants actually belongs in the case. Follow the filings, counsel, and coverage on the case page.
This post is editorial commentary on public court filings and news coverage, not legal advice. The allegations described are unproven, the defendants have not yet responded on the merits, and being named as a defendant is not evidence of wrongdoing. Details are drawn from the docket and press reports and may be refined as the case develops.