Legal News

Lawyers for Sony Music Entertainment have spent months trying to find a TikTok rapper who the label is suing for copyright infringement, even going to his mom’s house on Mother’s Day “in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her.” Now, a judge now says they can just slide into his DMs.
In an order issued Wednesday, Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that Sony had exhausted all reasonable routes to locate Trefuego — the artist behind a popular TikTok song called “90mh,” which Sony claims features a “flagrant” unlicensed sample from an earlier song.

Faced with that situation, the judge said Sony’s lawyers could instead reach out to his Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud accounts, which have remained active since Sony filed its lawsuit.

“Plaintiffs have shown that serving process via these social media platforms will be reasonably effective in giving Trefuego notice of this suit,” Judge Pittman wrote.

Sony has been pursuing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that his “90mh” — a track that’s been featured in 155,000 videos on TikTok and streamed 100 million times on Spotify — was built on an illegal sample from Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched a lawsuit in December.

Wednesday’s ruling highlights the extraordinary lengths that litigants like Sony must sometimes go to “serve” filings on opponents — a key procedural requirement in any lawsuit.

The same problem recently confronted lawyers repping Kanye West, who desperately wanted to drop the embattled rapper as a client but couldn’t find him to do so. And NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal spent months avoiding a lawsuit over his endorsement of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX — only to finally be located and served at a Heat-Celtics game last month.

In his decision on Sony’s case, Judge Pittman said the company’s lawyers had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego. They made “seven separate attempts” to serve him with the lawsuit, the judge said, including hiring a private investigator and scouring his social media pages.

In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s reps went “to his mother’s house on Mother’s Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Sadly, he was not there, and his own mother claimed she did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.

A typical alternative to in-person service would be to print a notice of the lawsuit in the local papers — the same thing that Kanye’s estranged lawyers wanted to do in his case. But in Wednesday’s decision, Judge Pittman said that “modern problems require modern solutions.”

“This court has concerns as to whether SoundCloud and TikTok rapper extraordinaire Trefuego is a regular reader of the Fort Worth Star Telegram or that he regularly visits the information tab of Fort Worth’s city website,” the judge wrote.

Judge Pittman ruled that Sony could instead use “certain social media accounts” that “most certainly belong to the young bard.” Trefuego’s Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and SoundCloud pages all “appear to be substantially active,” the judge said, and indicate that he is a “frequent user” of those platforms.

Ahead of the decision, Sony had offered one other digital alternative: to email the rapper’s manager, with whom Sony had correspondence over the unlicensed sample before it resorted to litigation. But the judge rejected that route, noting that “all lines of communication have ceased” with the manager since the filing of the case.

“Given his own mother’s willingness to deny her relationship to him, it is not unlikely that his manager would also willingly delete emails or continue to ignore them,” the judge wrote. “Because communications through this line have proven futile already, the Court will not grant service through this already explored dead-end avenue.”

Tory Lanez’s sentencing for shooting and wounding hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion was delayed on Tuesday. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Herriford accepted the defense’s request to delay Lanez’s sentencing, which is now scheduled for Aug. 7. Prosecutors are seeking a 13 year prison sentence and Lanez faces deportation to his native Canada. Herriford […]

New York’s top appeals court on Tuesday (June 13) handed a key victory to Kesha in her legal battle with Dr. Luke, making it more difficult for him to prove at a looming trial that she defamed the producer when she accused him of rape in 2014.
For years, Dr. Luke (full name Lukasz Gottwald) has claimed that the star legally defamed him with the “false and shocking” allegation that he drugged and raped her after a 2005 party, arguing she did so as leverage to secure a more lucrative deal.

But in a ruling on Tuesday, New York’s Court of Appeal ruled that Dr. Luke is legally a “public figure,” meaning he will need to show that Kesha (full name Kesha Rose Sebert) acted with “actual malice” when she made her statements — a notoriously difficult legal hurdle to clear.

“By 2014, when Gottwald initiated this defamation action, he was, by his own account, a celebrity — an acclaimed music producer who had achieved enormous success in a high-profile career,” the appeals court wrote. “He purposefully sought media attention for himself, his businesses, and for the artists he represented, including Sebert, to advance those business interests.”

To show that Kesha acted with “actual malice,” Dr. Luke will now need to prove at trial next month that she either knew her accusation was false or that she acted with a reckless disregard for the truth. That standard, created by the U.S. Supreme Court in a famous 1964 ruling for the New York Times, has made it extremely challenging for powerful people to file libel lawsuits in U.S. courts.

And that wasn’t the only win for Kesha in Tuesday’s decision. The appeals court also ruled that New York’s newly-enacted “anti-SLAPP” law applies to Dr. Luke’s case — meaning that if she beats the accusations, she can demand that he repay some of her legal bills.

“Sebert may assert a counterclaim under [the anti-SLAPP law] and, if successful, recover costs, attorney’s fees, and damages based on Gottwald’s continuation of this action following the [the statute’s] effective date,” the court wrote.

Though largely a victory for Kesha, part of the ruling did go in favor of Dr. Luke. The court largely refused to endorse Kesha’s arguments that many of the allegedly defamatory statements were shielded by so-called privileges — such as statements made ahead of litigation. For 20 of 25 such statements, the court ruled that a jury might side with Dr. Luke and find the statements fair game.

In a statement to Billboard, Dr. Luke’s lawyer Christine Lepera focused on those aspects of the ruling and said she and her team were still “fully confident that Mr. Gottwald will prevail at trial on his defamation claims.”

“We are pleased that the Court of Appeals agreed with Dr. Luke that the vast majority of Ms. Sebert’s statements are properly the subject of his defamation claim,” Lepera said. “Therefore, at trial, Ms. Sebert will be required to defend her harmful and long-standing press campaign against Mr. Gottwald.”

An attorney for Kesha did not immediately return a request for comment.

After nearly eight years of litigation, a trial in Dr. Luke’s lawsuit is scheduled to finally start on July 19. The trial had been repeatedly pushed back while both sides awaited Tuesday’s ruling by the Court of Appeals.

Read the entire ruling here:

A federal appeals court has issued a first-of-its-kind ruling that says blasting music with “sexually graphic” and “violently misogynistic” lyrics in a workplace could violate federal discrimination laws.
Reviving a lawsuit against an apparel company that played songs like Too $hort‘s “Blowjob Betty” and Eminem‘s “Stan” at a Nevada warehouse, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday (June 9) that the music had potentially created a “hostile or abusive environment” for female employees.

“Blasted from commercial-strength speakers placed throughout the warehouse, the music overpowered operational background noise and was nearly impossible to escape,” the appeals court wrote. “In turn, the music allegedly served as a catalyst for abusive conduct by male employees, who frequently pantomimed sexually graphic gestures, yelled obscenities, made sexually explicit remarks, and openly shared pornographic videos.”

The employer, S&S Activewear, argued the music didn’t constitute illegal bias under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, partly because it had been equally offensive to both men and women. And last year, a federal trial judge agreed, calling the case “fatally flawed” and dismissing it on those grounds.

But in Wednesday’s decision, the Ninth Circuit called that an “absurd interpretation” of the statute — and one that would create a “gaping hole” in discrimination law for any company that chose to be an “equal opportunity harasser.”

The appeals court said it was the first time it had ever ruled on the issue of “music-as-harassment” under the Civil Rights Act. But the judges said that sexist songs should be treated no differently than other situations where a workplace is “polluted with insult and intimidation.”

“[Female employees were] forced to tolerate the music and the toxic environment as a condition of continued employment,” the court wrote. “Whether sung, shouted, or whispered, blasted over speakers or relayed face-to-face, sexist epithets can offend and may transform a workplace into a hostile environment that violates Title VII.”

Importantly, Wednesday’s ruling does not say that S&S definitely violated the law; rather, it says the allegations against the company could have merit if they are eventually proven, and thus that the case should not have been dismissed so quickly. The case will now return to a lower court for more litigation and an eventual trial.

An attorney for S&S did not immediately return a request for comment on the decision.

The case was filed in 2020 by Stephanie Sharp and seven other women who worked at S&S’s Nevada warehouse. As examples of the music they were allegedly forced to listen to, they cited  “Blowjob Betty,” including its lyrics about a woman “who dies because of swallowing semen in her windpipe.” They also cited “Stan” and its lyrics about “placing a pregnant woman in the trunk of a vehicle and then driving the vehicle into a river … for the purpose of drowning her.”

Though the songs at issue in the case were mostly hip-hop, Wednesday’s ruling reviving that lawsuit was careful to stress that it was not targeting rap music specifically.

“It is beyond our purview to pass judgment on the appropriateness of music in the workplace writ large,” the court wrote. “Nor is it our objective to ascribe misogyny to any particular musical genre.”

In a statement to Billboard on Friday, lead plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Mausert said he and his clients were “very pleased” with a ruling that used “common sense” to reach the right result: “This opinion will prevent a lot of sexual harassment at a multitude of workplaces,” Mausert said. “It is well written and is pretty much a tour de force of Ninth Circuit law.”

Read the Ninth Circuit’s entire ruling here: