Introduction

Noel and Liam Gallagher, along with Oasis’s record label Big Brother Recordings and Sony Music Entertainment, have filed a legal claim in London’s High Court against the band’s former sound engineer, Huw Richards.  As a result, an archive of more than 100 hours of unreleased 1990s recordings, known as The Desk Tapes, has been pulled from a planned auction days before its sale.

The claim, filed on 29 September 2026, names Richards, his son Owain, and Worcestershire-based Littleton Auctions as defendants. It led to an injunction, a court order forcing the auction house to withdraw the collection from its 3 October sale. The tapes’ auction has been postponed while the dispute continues.

This dispute raises a simple but tricky question: who actually owns a recording? Is it the person who pressed record, or the artist being recorded?

What’s Actually Being Sold?

The collection, called The Desk Tapes, contains 209 DAT (digital audio) tapes, 73 analogue cassettes and three MiniDiscs. They were recorded directly from the sound desk during live shows, soundchecks and rehearsals between 1994 and 2001, the years Richards worked with Oasis.

Alongside 63 full live recordings is something far more personal, unfiltered conversations between Noel and Liam Gallagher. Littleton Auctions had valued the collection at up to £1.6 million, making it one of the biggest music archives to surface in years.

Possession Versus Ownership

Richards argues that because he made the recordings using his own equipment and has kept physical custody of the tapes for over two decades, he is entitled to sell them.

Oasis and Sony disagree, arguing that copyright (the legal right to copy, share and sell the material) belongs to them, regardless of who was sitting at the mixing desk. Think of a wedding photographer who keeps the memory card after the big day. Holding the physical copy does not automatically mean owning the rights to what is on it. 

Under UK copyright law, the person who makes the arrangements for a sound recording, not necessarily the person who operates the equipment, is usually treated as its owner, particularly where the recording was made as part of someone’s job.

Impact on Law Firms

This case is unlikely to stay confined to Richards, Oasis and a Worcestershire auction house. It creates varied work for different legal teams:

  •  Entertainment and media law: Firms that advise artists, labels and estates on this question, as many archives sitting in engineers’, managers’ and photographers’ attics raise the same unresolved tension between physical possession and copyright ownership.

  • Urgent injunction specialists: Oasis needed emergency relief before the auction date, and how quickly it was secured will likely be studied by litigators (court lawyers) advising other clients who need to stop a sale.

  • Contract review: The dispute may push labels to review old contracts with engineers, tightening ownership rules before another archive surfaces.

Future Outlook

This dispute is a reminder that intellectual property law is not about patents and trademarks. Decades-old recordings, photographs and footage sitting with former engineers, managers or crew members can resurface without warning. How quickly Oasis’s legal team secured an injunction shows how fast rights holders need to move once that happens.

The case shows that ownership needs to be clarified the moment something is made, rather than left unresolved until someone asks who owns it.