Legal News
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Damon Dash’s one-third stake in Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records is going up for auction later this month — but a source tells Billboard that the shares might come with some key limitations.
According to federal court filings this week, the United States Marshals Service will auction off Dash’s 33.3% interest in the storied record company to satisfy an $823,000 judgment against him in a lawsuit filed by movie producer Josh Webber over a failed film partnership.
The auction, set for Aug 29 at a Midtown Manhattan hotel, will have a minimum bid of $1.2 million, and prospective bidders will be required to post a $240,000 deposit for the right to take part in the proceedings.
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The sale will be for Dash’s stake in Roc-A-Fella Inc., an entity whose primary assets are the rights to Jay-Z’s iconic debut album Reasonable Doubt. According to an April article by Rolling Stone, the rest of the catalog of music released by Roc-A-Fella, which dissolved as an operational label in 2013, is owned by other entities and isn’t involved.
The owners of the other two-thirds of Roc-A-Fella — label cofounders Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) and Kareem “Biggs” Burke — have already attempted to stop the auction, including making changes to the company’s bylaws and intervening in the lawsuit. But a federal judge rejected such opposition in February.
The chance to own a valuable piece of rap IP will surely draw bidders, but a source with knowledge of the situation tells Billboard that there are important limitations to what is being auctioned off — namely, that they are buying a stake in a company with other members.
“Whomever buys Dame’s stake in Roc-A-Fella will be a minority owner without authority over any decision-making,” the source tells Billboard. “They won’t have the ability to sell the copyright or borrow against the master as all decisions require majority vote.”
The source also cautioned that the clock was ticking on Roc-A-Fella’s rights to Reasonable Doubt: “There’s also an expiration date on the master ownership for the company, which means revenue and the only asset doesn’t have many years left.”
The auction will be coordinated by Webber’s attorney, Chris Brown. He did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
Webber won his judgment back in 2022 after suing Dash for copyright infringement and defamation over their failed partnership on producing a film called Dear Frank. But Dash has yet to hand over the money, hence the court-ordered auction.
The filmmaker isn’t the only one seeking the money from Dash’s Roc-A-Fella stake. The New York City Department of Social Services (NYCDSS) will actually have first dibs, according to court documents, since Dash owes a total of $145,096 in unpaid child support to a woman named Rachel Roy for his two daughters and to a woman named Cindy Morales for his son.
Brown is also seeking to collect another $155,000 that Dash owes to him and another client, photographer Monique Bunn, from separate legal actions. But they’ve agreed that NYCDSS and Webber deserve to recoup their debts from Dash first.
If any money from the auction is left over, it will go to Dash himself. His attorney did not return a request for comment on Thursday.
Back in 2021, attorneys for Jay-Z and Roc-A-Fella sued Dash after news broke that he was planning to auction off a stake in Reasonable Doubt as a non-fungible token (NFT). They argued that the company, not Dash himself, owned the rights to the album: “The bottom line is simple: Dash can’t sell what he doesn’t own.” A year later, Dash signed a settlement in which he agreed that he had no right to sell any part of Jay-Z’s album — as an NFT or otherwise.
Last year, attorneys for Jay-Z, Biggs and Roc-A-Fella mounted a concerted effort to stop the court-ordered sale of Dash’s stake in the company. After jumping into Webber’s lawsuit, they told a federal judge that the auction would violate company bylaws, which they had amended in 2021 to prohibit such a sale.
But in February, the judge overseeing the case said the updated Roc-A-Fella bylaws had been enacted without Dash’s input and were unenforceable. Instead, he offered an alternative route for Jay-Z and Biggs that would still “readily address their concern” with the sale: “They can participate in the auction and place the winning bid.”
The estate of the late rapper Juice WRLD is being sued by a music producer named Joshua Jaramillo, who claims he’s owed royalties from the late rapper’s 2021 collab with Suga of BTS.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday (July 31) in Los Angeles court, Jaramillo says he served as a producer on “Girl of My Dreams,” a 2021 hit that debuted at No. 29 on the Hot 100, and that he was promised a 5% ownership stake and an additional 1% producer royalty.
But “despite repeated requests by plaintiff,” Jaramillo says the estate has not paid him everything he’s owed.
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“Plaintiff has performed all services under the contract. ‘Girl of My Dreams’ became a nationwide hit,” Jaramillo’s lawyers write. “Defendant has failed to pay plaintiff the full amount of agreed upon royalties.”
The lawsuit, which is short on details, also claims that the estate has refused to provide a legally-required accounting “to verify that all royalties were paid.”
A rep for the estate could not immediately be reached for comment.
Juice WRLD (Jarad Anthony Higgins), a pioneering voice in emo rap and SoundCloud rap, died of a drug overdose in December 2019 while onboard a private jet flying from Los Angeles to Chicago. Citing law enforcement sources, TMZ reported days later that the rapper swallowed a large number of pills to hide them from federal agents who were waiting for the plane to land.
Released as a promotional single for his posthumous 2021 album, Fighting Demons, “Girl of My Dreams” was a collaboration with South Korean rapper Suga and features lyrics in both English and Korean. Though the track spent just a week on the Billboard Hot 100, Fighting Demons was a bigger hit, spending 72 weeks on the Billboard 200 and peaking at No. 2.
The new case is the second time Juice’s estate has been sued over the past year. In October, an artist named PD Beats filed his own lawsuit claiming he’d served as one of the co-writers of the rapper’s 2021 track “Not Enough” but had not been paid his proper royalties.
That case, which also named “Not Enough” producer Dr. Luke (Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald) as a defendant, remains pending.
AI music firms Suno and Udio are firing back with their first responses to sweeping lawsuits filed by the major record labels, arguing that they were free to use copyrighted songs to train their models and claiming the music industry is abusing intellectual property to crush competition.
In legal filings on Thursday, the two firms admitted to using proprietary materials to create their artificial intelligence, with Suno saying it was “no secret” that the company had ingested “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.”
But both companies said that such use was clearly lawful under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the reuse of existing materials to create new works.
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“What Udio has done — use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations — is a quintessential ‘fair use,’” Udio wrote in its filing. “Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.”
The filings, lodged by the same law firm (Latham & Watkins) that reps both companies, go beyond the normal “answer” to a lawsuit — typically a sparse document that simply denies each claim. Instead, Suno and Udio went on offense, with extended introductions that attempt to frame the narrative of a looming legal battle that could take years to resolve.
In doing so, they took square aim at the major labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) that filed the case in June — a group that they said “dominates the music industry” and is now abusing copyright law to maintain that power.
“What the major record labels really don’t want is competition,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Where Suno sees musicians, teachers and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share.”
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of AI-generated music. Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit with “BBL Drizzy,” a parody track popularized with a remix by super-producer Metro Boomin and later sampled by Drake himself. And as of May, Suno had raised a total of $125 million in funding to create what Rolling Stone called a “ChatGPT for music.”
In June, the major labels sued both companies, claiming they had infringed copyrighted music on an “unimaginable scale” to train their models. The lawsuits accused the two firms of “trampling the rights of copyright owners” as part of a “mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service.”
The case followed similar lawsuits filed by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, which collectively pose what could be a trillion-dollar legal question: Is it infringement to use vast troves of proprietary works to build an AI model that spits out new creations? Or is it just a form of legal fair use, transforming all those old works into something entirely new?
In Thursday’s response, Suno and Udio argued unequivocally that it was the latter. They likened their machines to a “human musician” who had played earlier songs to learn the “building blocks of music” — and then used what they had learned to create entirely new works in existing styles.
“Those genres and styles — the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music — are not something that anyone owns,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song.”
The lawsuit from the labels, Suno and Udio say, are thus an abuse of copyright law, aimed at claiming improper ownership over “entire genres of music.” They called the litigation an “attempt to misuse IP rights to shield incumbents from competition and reduce the universe of people who are equipped to create new expression.”
Both filings hint at how Suno and Udio will make their fair use arguments. The two companies say the cases will not really turn on the “inputs” — the millions of songs used to train the models — but rather on the “outputs,” or the new songs that are created. While the labels are claiming that the inputs were illegally copied, the AI firms say the music companies “explicitly disavow” that any output was a copycat.
“That concession will ultimately prove fatal to plaintiffs’ claims,” Suno wrote in its filing. “It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process,invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.”
A spokeswoman and an attorney for the labels did not immediately return a request for comment.
R. Kelly is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, arguing the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
In a petition filed with the high court on Monday (July 29), attorneys for the disgraced R&B singer asked the justices to take up his case and toss out an April ruling by a lower appeals court, which said that “no statute of limitations saves him” from his 2022 convictions.
Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, argued that an updated federal law extending the statute of limitations, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Like all appeals to the Supreme Court, Kelly’s case faces long odds. The high court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
This week’s petition deals with only one of Kelly’s two sets of felony sex abuse convictions. The other one — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is currently pending on appeal before a lower appellate court.
In the current case, a different team of federal prosecutors from Chicago accused Kelly of violating child pornography laws, enticing minors for sex and obstructing justice by upending a 2008 criminal trial. Though he was acquitted on certain counts, Kelly was convicted in September 2022 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison; the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence.
Bonjean, who famously won a 2021 ruling at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturning Bill Cosby‘s 2018 sex assault conviction, has repeatedly argued that Kelly is innocent and that she will take his cases all the way to the Supreme Court.
In doing so on Monday, she focused on the PROTECT Act — a 2003 federal statute aimed at preventing child abuse. Among other changes, the 2003 law eliminated the statutes of limitations for child sex abuse victims, extending the right to sue through the entire life of the victim.
But Bonjean said the PROTECT Act was not written to apply retroactively to crimes allegedly committed before it was passed. Without a clear intention from Congress to apply it to past crimes, she wrote, a law must be considered to only apply to future wrongdoing.
“This court has explained that the aversion to retroactive rulemaking is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence and embodies a legal doctrine centuries older than our Republic,” she wrote. “Elementary considerations of fairness dictate that individuals should have an opportunity to know what the law is and to conform their conduct.”
StubHub is facing a lawsuit from Washington DC’s attorney general over allegations that the ticket resale platform foists “convoluted junk fees” on concertgoers after luring them in with “deceptively low prices.”
In a complaint filed Wednesday, Attorney General Brian Schwalb accuses StubHub of violating the District’s consumer protection laws by using the “drip pricing” — an “exploitative pricing scheme” in which a company requires consumers to pay fees that weren’t advertised in the initial price.
“For years, StubHub has illegally deceived District consumers through its convoluted junk fee scheme,” Schwalb said in a statement announcing the case. “StubHub lures consumers in by advertising a deceptively low price, forces them through a burdensome purchase process, and then finally reveals a total on the checkout page that is vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”
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The “hidden” fees imposed by StubHub total “upwards of 40% of the advertised ticket price,” the lawsuit claims, and DC consumers have allegedly paid $118 million in such fees since 2015.
In a statement, StubHub said the company was “committed to creating a transparent, secure and competitive marketplace” for its customers. “We are disappointed that the DC Attorney General is targeting StubHub when our user experience is consistent with the law, our competitors’ practices and the broader e-commerce sector. We strongly support federal and state solutions that enhance existing laws to empower consumers, such as requiring all-in pricing uniformly across platforms.”
Consumers have complained for years about “convenience” and “service” fees that are tacked onto the price of tickets for concerts and other live events. Laws requiring “all-in pricing” — the full, final cost, presented at the beginning of a sale — have been enacted by New York, California and other states in recent years. A federal bill (Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET, Act) was passed by the House of Representatives in May and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Hidden fees are also a key accusation in the pending antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation filed by the Department of Justice earlier this year. In that case, the DOJ has argued that such fees levied by Ticketmaster on American concertgoers “far exceed” those in other countries.
“Any fan who has logged onto Ticketmaster’s website to buy a concert ticket knows the feeling of shock and frustration as the base cost of the ticket increases dramatically with the addition of fees,” the DOJ wrote in its complaint against Live Nation. “Whatever the name of the fee and however the fees are packaged and collected, they are essentially a ‘Ticketmaster Tax’ that ultimately raise the price fans pay.”
In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Schwalb argues that StubHub imposes those same fees on its customers. Calling it a “a classic bait-and-switch scheme,” the lawsuit claims the final price of a StubHub ticket is only revealed after customers have “invested time and effort clicking through an intentionally long, multi-page purchase process” — which features a countdown clock to “create a false sense of urgency.”
“StubHub designed this unfair and deceptive scheme to make more money,” Schwalb wrote. “By forcing consumers to click through over a dozen pages before they see the real price, StubHub puts consumers in the position of having to choose between either paying those unexpected fees or abandoning the time and effort they have expended.”
In addition to springing such fees at the end of a transaction, the lawsuit also accuses StubHub of choosing deceptive names for them — a claim that echoes longstanding complaints about what vaguely-named ticketing fees imposed by many companies actually cover.
“What StubHub identifies as ‘Fulfillment and Service Fees’ are in fact influenced by factors unrelated to ‘fulfillment’ or ‘service,’” the lawsuit reads. “Furthermore, the fees vary wildly, and StubHub never discloses to the consumer how those fees are calculated or what services these fees fund.”
Read the entire lawsuit against StubHub here:
The new judge in Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial has denied the rapper’s renewed request to be released from jail until a verdict is reached.
Two weeks after Judge Paige Reese Whitaker became the third judge to preside over the huge racketeering case, she rejected arguments from Thug’s attorney Brian Steel to release the rapper on bond and allow him to live under house arrest with strict monitoring.
Steel had argued that the recent turbulent events in the case — Judge Ural Glanville was ordered removed from the case over a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness — were the kind of “changed circumstances” that would allow her to overturn earlier rulings that kept him locked up.
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But at a hearing Tuesday, Whitaker was unswayed. “I don’t know how I would have decided the bond originally,” the judge said. “That’s not before me. These are not the kind of changed circumstances [required under precedent], so I’m not going to reconsider the bond.”
Thug — real name Jeffery Williams — and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that their YSL was not really a record label called Young Stoner Life but rather a violent Atlanta gang called Young Slime Life. Citing Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, prosecutors claim the group operated a criminal enterprise that committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
The trial kicked off in January 2023 but has faced repeated delays and disruptions, including an unprecedented 10-month jury selection, the stabbing of another defendant and now the removal of the presiding judge. Prosecutors have only presented part of their vast list of potential witnesses, and the case is expected to run well into 2025.
Thug has been sitting in jail for more than two years while the slow-moving trial has dragged on, repeatedly denied bond by Glanville over concerns that he might intimidate witnesses. But with Glanville gone, Steel argued last week that Thug should not be “languishing in the county jail” under “tortuous” conditions when he has not be convicted of a crime.
At Tuesday’s hearing, he reiterated those pleas to Whitaker. “Mr. Williams has been in custody since the 9th day of May, 2022,” Steel said. “He has sat through unnecessary jury selection for months, bringing in over 2,000 people when the jurors were chosen from the first 511. That should not be on him. That is excess. He has now sat here for a month while the antics of Judge Glanville and [prosecutors] caused him to wander in squalor in a jail.”
Though Whitaker denied Thug’s renewed request for bond, the new judge suggested during the hearing that she would speed up the pace of the case, ordering prosecutors to better organize their planned witness testimony and evidence, saying, “It should not take another seven months.”
The judge is also still considering whether case should continue at all. Thug and three of the other YSL defendants have moved for a mistrial, citing Glanville’s conduct and other issues with the case.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Whitaker denied two of those motions, including one that had argued that a brand new judge could not possibly “make informed rulings” after missing the first 19 months of a trial in which over 100 witnesses had already testified. But she left two pending, including Steel’s accusations that Glanville’s behavior had irreparably broken the case.
“If that is the case, there will be a different ruling made that will impact this trial, that may result in a mistrial, that may result in a mistrial with prejudice,” the judge said.
The 1975 and frontman Matty Healy are facing a lawsuit from the organizers of Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival, according to a report by Variety, filed over accusations that Healy’s on-stage protest of the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws resulted in the festival being shut down.
In a case filed in the UK’s High Court, Future Sound Asia is demanding $2.4 million over the July 2023 incident in Kuala Lumpur, during which Healy gave a profanity-laden speech criticizing Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ laws and then kissed bandmate Ross MacDonald.
Following the incident, local authorities revoked the festival’s license and canceled the final two nights of shows. As reported by Billboard last year, sources within Future Sound said that the incident left the festival in financial ruin and could limit future concerts in Malaysia for years.
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In its lawsuit, Future Sound claims that Healy and The 1975 breached their contract with the festival, which stipulated that they would abide by local guidelines. Those rules included kissing, swearing, smoking and drinking on stage, taking off clothes, and talking about politics or religion.
The case claims that local authorities initially refused to let The 1975 play at all, citing Healy’s drug problems. But Future Sound claims that the band appealed and promised that Healy would adhere to “all local guidelines and regulations” in order to secure approval.
A rep for the band did not immediately return a request for comment on the accusations.
Healy’s kiss and statements — he said, among other things, that it was “f—ing ridiculous to tell people what they can do with that and that” — were meant as a protest against Malaysia’s strict anti-LGBTQ+ laws, which make homosexuality a crime.
But local activists have since criticized him, calling it a “publicity stunt” by a Western rock star with a “white savior complex.” He also took light criticism from Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, who had been scheduled to play before the festival was canceled, who said that people “should be knowledgable and respectful toward the culture you’re not familiar with.”
Healy addressed those critiques in October, saying he was “pissed off” about the “liberal outrage against our band for remaining consistent with our pro-LGBTQ stage show.”
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Martin Shkreli argues he wasn’t required to turn over personal copies of a rare of Wu-Tang Clan album to prosecutors; a litigious rock photographer sues Warner Records in the latest of more than 50 copyright lawsuits; the new judge in Young Thug’s gang trial faces a flood of new motions; and more.
THE BIG STORY: The Plot Thickens In Wu-Tang Album Case
When Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and ordered to forfeit his copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to federal prosecutors, was he allowed to retain personal copies? PleasrDAO — a digital art collective that bought the one-of-a-kind album from the government in 2021 —certainly thinks he wasn’t. The group sued Shkreli in federal court last month, accusing him of violating that forfeiture order by retaining copies and then threatening to leak them to the public, a move it says would destroy the value of the rare album. But in a new response last week, Shkreli’s attorneys told a very different story. Everyone knows that when the disgraced “Pharma Bro” bought the only copy of Wu-Tang’s album in 2014, the deal came with bizarre contractual requirements — namely, that he couldn’t release it to the general public until 2103. But Shkreli’s lawyers say the deal did allow him to make personal copies for private use. And when he turned over the physical CD to the government, his lawyers say he wasn’t required to hand over those private copies: “Defendant continues to have the right to use them to this day.” A month into the lawsuit, two dueling visions are coming into view. Pleasr is leaning on the forfeiture order, citing a passage that banned Shkreli from taking any action that would “affect the availability, marketability or value” of the album. Defense lawyers, on the other hand, point to the government’s sale to Pleasr, arguing that the feds made no assurances that the original CD was the only copy of Shaolin in existence. “Plaintiff was well aware that its purchase of assets from did not include any promise or expectation of ‘exclusivity’ or ‘uniqueness,’” Shkreli’s lawyers wrote. “It bought a copy of a musical work that it knew was not unique, and cannot now claim to be irreparably harmed by the existence of its non-uniqueness.” For more, go read our full story on the Shaolin case — and stay tuned for a looming ruling from the judge on whether to impose a preliminary injunction against Shkreli.
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Other top stories this week…
LEGAL EXPOSURE? – Neil Zlozower, a veteran rock photographer who’s snapped images of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and many other bands, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Warner Records, accusing the label of using his photo of Tom Petty in a Facebook post without permission. It turns out the case is hardly the first for Zlozower, who has filed a whopping 57 copyright lawsuits since 2016, targeting Universal Music Group, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Mötley Crüe and many others over alleged unauthorized use of his images.CONCERT MELEE – Chris Brown and Live Nation were sued again over an alleged melee that took place backstage at a concert in Fort Worth last week, this time by a security guard who says he was “brutally and severely” beaten when he tried to break up the fight. The lawsuit, which cites Brown’s high-profile 2009 attack on his then-girlfriend Rihanna that led to a felony conviction, comes after the alleged victims themselves filed their own separate case.YSL CASE UPDATE – The new judge in Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial, Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, has been greeted by a flood of new motions, including a renewed demand to release the rapper from the “torturous conditions” he’s faced while sitting in jail for more than two years. Judge Ural Glanville, who was removed from the case earlier this month after revelations of a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness, had repeatedly denied such requests. SHOOTING ARRESTS – Three men were arrested in Jacksonville in connection with the deadly shooting of rapper Julio Foolio last month. Sean Gathright, 18, Alicia Andrews, 21, and Isaiah Chance Jr., 21, were each charged with premeditated first degree murder with a firearm, among other charges, over the June 23 killing.
The Tampa Police Department announced the arrest of three people on Monday (July 29) in connection with deadly shooting of rapper Julio Foolio last month. According to WFLA, three individuals — Sean Gathright, 18, Alicia Andrews, 21, and Isaiah Chance Jr., 21 — were arrested in Jacksonville and charged with premeditated first degree murder and […]
Neil Zlozower, a veteran rock photographer who’s snapped images of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, is suing Warner Records over a Facebook post featuring a picture of Tom Petty — the latest of more than 50 lawsuits the litigious photog has filed over the past decade.
In a case filed in Los Angeles federal court, Zlozower accuses Warner of infringing the copyright to his photo, which depicts ’70s-era Petty sitting in front of a record player. His lawyers claim the image was posted in 2020 to the official Facebook page for Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, which Warner allegedly controls.
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“Defendant has not implemented adequate internal policies to verify copyright ownership before content use, indicating a gross negligence in legal compliance, which is essential for a company with defendant’s reach, capabilities, and level of sophistication,” Zlozower’s lawyer Craig Sanders writes in the July 23 complaint.
Warner’s alleged failure to employ such copyright protections indicates “de facto willful infringement” by the company, the lawsuit claims — a key accusation, since under U.S. copyright law “willful” violations can result in increased damages of up to $150,000 per work.
A spokesman for Warner did not return a request for comment on the lawsuit’s allegations.
The case is hardly the first for Zlozower, who has also photographed Prince, Van Halen and countless other bands and artists over a decades-long career. Since 2016, court records show he’s filed a whopping 57 copyright lawsuits against a wide range of defendants in federal courts around the country, demanding monetary damages over the alleged unauthorized use of his photographs.
Many of his cases have targeted media companies, including CBS, Buzzfeed and Vice. But he’s also twice sued Universal Music Group, once over an image of Elvis Costello and another time over a photo of Guns N’ Roses. A different case targeted Ticketmaster, accusing the Live Nation unit of using an image of Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. In 2019, Zlozower sued the guitar maker Gibson over claims that the company used a shot of Eddie Van Halen without permission.
Copyright lawsuits over the unauthorized use of photographs on the internet are extremely common, with hundreds filed in the federal courts each year. The photographers and attorneys who bring them say it’s their only real recourse against rampant online theft of their intellectual property, often by sophisticated companies that should know better.
“Photographers who are serious about protecting their copyright have no other choice but to file suit in [court] when an infringer refuses to negotiate,” says David C. Deal, an attorney who represents photographers in such cases. “Photographers are the overwhelming losers in the digital age because they are properly compensated at a fraction of the rate at which their intellectual property is copied and used by others.”
But critics have questioned the tactics of some particularly litigious photographers and their attorneys, suggesting they’re using litigation itself as a business model — namely, by leveraging the threat of huge damages and prohibitive costs of to win as many small “nuisance” settlements as possible.
In 2019, a federal judge sharply criticized David Oppenheimer, a North Carolina photographer who filed more than 170 such lawsuits. As detailed by The Assembly, Judge Martin Reidinger cited Oppenheimer’s big demands and high volume of cases before saying that he “appears to be using the copyright laws as a source of revenue, rather than as redress for legitimate injury.”
A year earlier, a New York federal judge used harsher language about Richard Liebowitz, a Long Island attorney who filed thousands of such photo infringement cases. Judge Denise Cote labeled the lawyer a “copyright troll” — which she defined as someone who aims to win “quick” settlements that are “priced just low enough” that it makes financial sense to simply “pay the troll rather than defend the claim.”
“As evidenced by the astonishing volume of filings coupled with an astonishing rate of voluntary dismissals and quick settlements in Mr. Liebowitz’s cases in this district, it is undisputable that Mr. Liebowitz is a copyright troll,” the judge wrote in her 2018 decision.
In November 2021, Liebowitz was suspended from practicing law in New York over a pattern of misconduct, including “behavior that made a mockery of orderly litigation processes.” Earlier this year, he was disbarred by the state for failing to comply with court orders and making false statements.
According to federal court records, Liebowitz represented Zlozower in the vast majority of his copyright cases until 2021. In 2018, his firm filed nine lawsuits on behalf of the photographer, including one against Spotify over an image of Mötley Crüe on the band’s artist page. In the year 2019 alone, Liebowitz’s firm filed 14 more cases for Zlozower, including one against famed indie record store Amoeba Music.
According to Deal, many photographers face an “impossible position” on the modern internet: Allow for-profit businesses to exploit their works for free, or “insist on being properly compensated” and risk being labeled a “troll” when they take action in court. But even within that context of mass infringement, Deal says, Zlozower’s volume of litigation seems unusually high.
“The idea of one photographer filing an average of 5-6 cases per year strikes me as excessive,” Deal says, saying his own firm will only typically sue in a “very small percentage of cases” after exhausting every other option.
One of Zlozower’s earliest cases was filed against Mötley Crüe itself. Represented by Liebowitz, he accused the band in September 2016 of creating t-shirts and other concert merch for its 2014 “Final Tour” that were emblazoned with photos he had snapped of Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and other members during Crüe’s 1980s heyday. But unlike many such defendants, the band actually fought back.
During two years of litigation, attorneys for Mötley Crüe argued that the band had already paid decades earlier for the right to use those images, and that it had “continued to use them without objection ever since.” Crüe also filed its own countersuit, accusing Zlozower of infringing their trademarks and likenesses by using the band’s name and images to sell books and prints: “Zlozower never requested, nor received, consent to sell photographs depicting the likenesses of the band members of Mötley Crüe.”
But in 2020, the case against Crüe ended like many of Zlozower’s have: in a confidential settlement and the voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit, without a final ruling on the merits. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed in court filings.
Zlozower and his current attorney, Sanders, did not return requests for comment from Billboard.