Publishing is not assignment, and the difference is your song
Two contracts that look alike and do opposite things. One keeps you as the owner; the other transfers your rights.
4 min read
Every songwriter who has ever received an offer from a publisher has heard both words. They are not synonyms, and the difference between them decides whether your song is still yours.
Assignment
An assignment (article 49 of Law 9,610/98, the Brazilian Copyright Act) transfers the economic rights in the work. Whoever assigns stops being the rights holder of what was assigned. The law surrounds this with safeguards: it is only valid in writing, it is interpreted narrowly and, a detail almost nobody knows, without a written term the maximum is five years.
Publishing
A publishing agreement (article 53) is something else. You keep ownership and authorize a publisher to exploit the work exclusively, for the term and on the conditions you agree on, with an ongoing percentage share of the revenue.
It is this ongoing share that recent Brazilian case law points to as the hallmark of a publishing agreement, as opposed to a permanent assignment in disguise.
Why this matters in practice
In July 2026, a dispute over an agreement signed in 1967 ended with the contract reclassified by the courts: what the publisher claimed was a permanent assignment was recognized as a publishing agreement, and terminated for failure to render accounts. Almost six decades later.
The lesson isn’t about that case. It’s about the kind of document you sign today: badly written contracts don’t age, they rot and blow up.
What to check in any offer
- Does it say “assignment” or “publishing”? And does the body of the contract do what the title promises?
- Does it have a written term? An open ended term is a red flag.
- Does it require accounting? How often, and in how much detail?
- Does it have a reversion clause? What happens if the song sits idle and nobody records it?
- What is the percentage? In Brazil, a traditional publishing share can reach 50% of the songwriter’s royalties.
Where Yawh stands
Yawh works with publishing agreements, never with permanent assignment. You remain the rights holder of your song. Our share is between 20% and 30% depending on the plan, below a traditional Brazilian publisher and above a pure administrator, because we deliver more than administration.
The incentive is aligned by the structure itself: the publisher only earns if the song earns.