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An eccentric Florida real estate mogul who lost millions investing in two West Coast festivals linked to Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson won a bittersweet legal victory Friday (April 12) when a Delaware judge awarded him a $2 million breach of contract verdict over the collapse of KAABOO festival — but rejected larger fraud claims that could have netted him millions in damages.
Delaware judge Paul Wallace found that KAABOO’s previous owners had lied and misrepresented the financial health of the festival to investor Marc Hagle, who bought KAABOO in 2019, but ruled that Hagle likely knew the projections were fake because one of the festival’s board members had been sharing confidential data with Hagle during sales negotiations.
All told, Hagle, a 75-year-old Orlando commercial real estate developer, is estimated to have lost approximately $23 million investing in the festival business, including spending $10 million to buy the ill-fated KAABOO festival in September 2019, before going on to lose millions more unsuccessfully developing the Virgin Fest in Los Angeles.
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While the loss certainly stung, Hagle isn’t hurting for cash, having made his fortune building shopping centers for Walmart. In 2020, he donated $10 million to his alma mater, Purdue University, and two years later pledged $5 million to the University of Central Florida. In 2022, Hagle and his wife became the first married couple to travel to space on a flight from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and are currently constructing a massive $33 million, 45,000-sq.-ft home in Winter Park, Fla., that will include a basement gun range and an indoor pool.
Friday’s ruling, absent an appeal, likely represents the end of Hagle’s attempt to recoup his $23 million loss through the court system. Earlier this year, a California appeals court refused to overturn a 2022 Los Angeles Superior Court decision allowing Lizzo, Ellie Goulding and Kali Uchis to keep millions in fees Hagle had advanced the artists in February 2020 to secure their performances at Virgin Fest. Weeks after the artists were announced, much of the United States went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the cancellation of the festival.
Former Bear Stearns investment banker Bryan Gordon launched KAABOO in 2015, modeling the event’s high-end food and hospitality offerings around Napa’s BottleRock festival with headliner talent that included Pink, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters.
Marketed to an older, more affluent audience, KAABOO quickly grew in popularity, but behind the scenes, Gordon’s brash style led to lawsuits from former investors, ex-employees and former partner Brett Mosiman, a Kansas promoter who won a $7 million judgement against Gordon in 2020.
While Gordon allegedly presented himself to Mosiman and others as a highly successful businessman who “owned so many hotels” he couldn’t “even count them” and regularly bought “$400 bottles of wine like they’re Chiclets,” financial documents obtained by Billboard showed Gordon had lost $30 million on KAABOO in less than five years.
Without an immediate capital infusion, Gordon would have to cancel the 2019 version of the festival, bankrupting KAABOO and prompting dozens of class-actions lawsuits from ticketholders that could have spread to Gordon’s other festival investments, like Virgin Fest, which Gordon co-owned with KAABOO’s chief marketing officer Jason Felts.
At the time, Virgin Fest was a holding company that owned the rights to license the Virgin trademark for music events and festivals from Branson. Running out of options for saving KAABOO, Gordon entered negotiations with Hagle for a deal that would eventually see Gordon resign from his position at Virgin Fest and sell his controlling shares in KAABOO to Virgin Fest in a $10 million deal financed by Hagle. As part of the agreement, Gordon would continue to produce KAABOO on behalf of Virgin Fest.
While the last-minute acquisition averted cancellation, it wasn’t long before both sides ended up in court, kicking off a five-year legal battle over the sale of KAABOO, which has been defunct ever since.
Gordon fired the first shot in the legal battle, filing suit against Virgin Fest weeks after the sale closed, alleging that Hagle and Virgin Fest had failed to pay KAABOO’s invoices in retaliation for Gordon’s decision to fire most of the KAABOO staff and place his daughter in charge of the company. Hagle and Virgin Fest countersued, arguing that Gordon had misled them about the festival’s financial outlook and falsified KAABOO’s financial records.
After a seven-day trial took place in a Delaware courtroom in January, Judge Wallace issued his ruling on Friday, finding that email evidence in the case indicated Gordon and company officers Robert Walker and Seth Wolkov spent hours systematically deleting expenses and overstating revenue so that KAABOO’s 2019 financial projection would show a modest $275,000 profit for the year instead of the more accurate $3 million loss company officials had previously forecast.
Wallace wrote that “KAABOO management made knowingly false representations” to Hagle and his attorneys and accused Gordon, Wolkov and Walker of “deliberate acts of concealment” and having “a clear motive to commit fraud.”
That wasn’t enough to win a fraud ruling, however, Wallace wrote in his 70-page decision. That’s because Hagle didn’t adequately prove he relied on the financial documents handed over by Gordon’s team and likely knew the claims were fake, Wallace explained. Emails produced during the trial showed that Felts — who was on the board of KAABOO at the same time his company, Virgin Fest, was trying to buy KAABOO, had been sending updates about the festival’s worsening financial health to Hagle, encouraging the real estate investor to play hardball with KAABOO and win concessions to sweeten the deal.
Wallace did, however, find that Gordon’s misrepresentations breached a transparency clause in the asset purchase agreement between KAABOO and Virgin Fest. According to the asset purchase agreement’s own guidelines, damages resulting from the breach of the document are capped at $2 million. Wallace thereby ordered KAABOO to pay Virgin Fest $2 million in damages, plus attorney fees.
For his part, Gordon was awarded a $360,000 consulting fee that Virgin Fest never paid him after he resigned from the company.
It’s unclear if Hagle plans to appeal the verdict. Without a legal option for recouping his investment, Hagle’s chances of recovering his investment hinge on the success of a group of new investors who have reportedly begun trying to raise money to license the KAABOO brand from Hagle as part of a brand revival. The investment group has not yet announced whether they will be reviving the festival brand in 2024 or 2025.
The U.S. Department of Justice is planning to sue Live Nation over alleged violations of federal antitrust laws, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
A lawsuit will be filed within weeks that alleges the concert giant leveraged its dominance over the live music industry to undermine competition for ticketing, the Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Few other details about the planned case were revealed.
Live Nation has faced widespread criticism from angry fans and lawmakers since its botched handling of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour in 2022. Days after the incident, news broke that the DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months over potential antitrust violations.
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Representatives for Live Nation and the DOJ did not immediately return requests for comment from Billboard.
Since Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, the company has long faced criticism that it exerts an unfair dominance over the market for live concerts. The DOJ approved the merger at the time, but imposed a so-called consent decree designed to prevent the company from abusing its position. Those restrictions were set to expire in 2020, but they were extended by five years after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.
That same criticism resurfaced in late 2022 with the disastrous roll out of tickets to Swift’s tour, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried – and many failed – to buy tickets. Live Nation pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks,” but lawmakers quickly argued that the incident was the result of a market dominated by one company.
“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues.
In December 2022, the New York Times reported that DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months before the Swift debacle, including reaching out to venues across the country to ask about the company’s conduct. A year later, Reuters reported that the probe was ongoing, with federal investigators focusing on whether Live Nation imposed anticompetitive agreements on venues.
Last year, Live Nation hired Dan Wall, a veteran competition attorney who previously headed the antitrust practice at the law firm Latham & Watkins, as an executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs. In a blog post last month, Wall publicly defended the company against allegations similar to those that could be coming in the DOJ’s lawsuit, arguing that ticket prices were set by artists and driven up by the forces of supply and demand.
“In the ongoing antitrust attacks on Live Nation and Ticketmaster, a constant theme is that their alleged ‘monopolies’ are responsible for high ticket prices,” Wall wrote. “Rhetorically, that’s understandable, because if you want to rile up fans against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, there is no better way than to blame them for something you know fans dislike.”
Global Music Rights (GMR), the boutique U.S. performance rights organization (PRO) that represents Bruce Springsteen, Bruno Mars, Prince, Drake, Pharrell Williams, the John Lennon estate, the Eagles and others, has settled its copyright infringement lawsuit against the Vermont Broadcast Association (VBA) that was filed in January. According to Global Music Rights, which was founded by […]
A new law in Tennessee aimed at protecting artists from AI-powered voice mimicry has won widespread acclaim from the music industry, but some legal experts are worried such laws might be an “overreaction” that could have unintended consequences.
Less than a year after a fake Drake song created using new artificial intelligence tools took the music world by storm, Tennessee lawmakers enacted first-in-the-nation legislation last month aimed at preventing exactly that scenario — the use of a person’s voice without their permission. The ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security) does that by expanding the state’s protections against the unauthorized use of a person’s likeness, known as publicity rights.
The passage of the new law was hailed across the music business. Mitch Glazier of the Recording Industry Association of America called it an “incredible result.” Harvey Mason Jr. of the Recording Academy described it as a “groundbreaking achievement.” David Israelite of the National Music Publishers’ Association called it “an important step forward.” Any musical artist who has had their voice used without permission likely shares those sentiments.
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But legal experts are more divided. Jennifer Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the country’s top experts on publicity rights, rang alarm bells last week at a panel discussion in Nashville, warning that Tennessee’s new statute had not been necessary and had been “rushed” into law.
“We don’t want a momentary overreaction to lead to the passage of laws that would make things worse, which is currently what is happening,” Rothman told her fellow panel members and the audience. “The ELVIS Act has a number of significant concerns that are raised, particularly with the broad sweep of liability and restrictions on speech.”
In an effort to combat AI voice cloning, the ELVIS Act makes a number of key changes to the law. Most directly, it expands the state’s existing publicity rights protections to explicitly include someone’s voice as part of their likeness. But the new law also expands the law in ways that have received less attention, including adding a broader definition of who can be sued and for what.
According to Joseph Fishman, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who has been closely tracking the legislation, that broader wording “sweeps in innocuous behavior that no one seriously thinks is a problem that needs solving” — potentially including tribute bands, interpolations, or even just sharing a photo that a celebrity didn’t authorize.
“The range of acts that trigger liability is vast,” Fishman tells Billboard. “All the press around this law is focused on deepfakes and digital replicas — and those would indeed be covered — but the law as written goes so much further.”
Here’s why: Historically, publicity rights in the U.S. have been mostly limited to commercial contexts — like advertisements that use a celebrity’s likeness to make it appear they’re endorsing a product. The singer Bette Midler once famously sued the Ford Motor Co. over a series of commercials featuring vocals by a Midler impersonator.
The new law effectively gets rid of that commercial limitation; under the ELVIS Act, anyone who knowingly “makes available” someone’s likeness without authorization can face a lawsuit. It also broadly defines protected voices as any sound that’s “readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual.”
Those are great changes if you’re a musical artist trying to sue over a song that’s using a fake version of your voice, since the old conception of publicity rights likely wouldn’t apply to that scenario. But Fishman says they have serious potential for collateral damage beyond their intended target.
“There’s nothing that would limit it to AI outputs, nothing that would limit it to deceptive uses,” Fishman said. “The lead singer in an Elvis tribute band who sings convincingly like The King certainly seems to fall under the definition. So do Elvis impersonators.”
In an “even more extreme” hypothetical, Fishman imagined an “unflattering” photo of Elvis that he knew the Presley estate didn’t like. “The law seems to say I’d be liable if I sent that photo to a friend. After all, I’m transmitting his likeness, knowing that the rightsholder hasn’t authorized the use. Stop and think about that for a moment.”
The ELVIS Act does contain exemptions aimed at protecting free speech, including those that allow for the legal use of someone’s likeness in news coverage, criticism, scholarship, parody and other “fair use” contexts. It also expressly allows for “audiovisual works” that contain “a representation of the individual as the individual’s self” — a provision likely aimed at allowing Hollywood to keep making biopics and other films about real people without getting sued in Tennessee.
But confusingly, the law says those exemptions only apply “to the extent such use is protected by the First Amendment.” That wording, according to Rothman, means those exemptions essentially “don’t exist” unless and until a court rules that a specific alleged activity is a form of protected free speech, a costly extra step that will mostly benefit those who want to be in court. “This specific law creates great work for lawyers,” Rothman said. “So much work for lawyers.”
Those lawyers are going to be filing real lawsuits against real people — some of whom are the scary, voice-cloning bad actors that the music industry wants to crack down on, but also some of whom are likely just regular people doing things that used to be legal.
“The law could absolutely lead to lots of lawsuits,” Fishman says. “There’s plenty of room here for people to test how far the statute can go, whether because they object to how they’re being depicted or because they see an opportunity for an extra licensing stream.”
Though it only applies to Tennessee, the importance of the ELVIS Act is magnified because it is the first of likely many such legislative efforts aimed at addressing AI mimicry. At least five other states are currently considering amending their publicity rights laws to address the growing problem, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also weighing federal legislation that would create a national likeness statute for the first time.
At last week’s roundtable, Rothman said those efforts were misguided. She said that laws already on the books — including federal trademark law, existing publicity rights laws, and numerous other statutes and torts — already provide avenues to stop voice cloning and deepfakes. And she warned that the proposed federal bills posed even more serious problems, like allowing someone to sign away their likeness rights in perpetuity.
For other legal experts critical of the ELVIS Act, including Harvard University law professor Rebecca Tushnet, the hope is that any subsequent legislation, whether at the state or federal level, can be more directly tailored to the actual AI-fueled deceptions they’re supposed to address.
“Any new laws need to be far more targeted at specific harms,” says Tushnet, who has written extensively about the intersection of intellectual property and free speech. “Right now, this statute and other proposals are dramatically overbroad, and threaten legitimate creative conduct.”
Jelly Roll is facing a federal lawsuit from a well-known Philadelphia wedding band called Jellyroll, claiming that the rapper’s stage name violates the group’s trademark rights.
In a complaint filed Monday in federal court, attorneys for Kurt Titchenell accused the rapper-turned-country singer (Jason DeFord) of infringing his trademark to Jellyroll — the name he’s used for decades for an act the Philadelphia Inquirer has labeled as “Philly’s favorite wedding band.”
The lawsuit claims that Jelly Roll’s increasing popularity — his “Need A Favor” reached No. 13 on the Hot 100 in November — has flooded the market with his name, making it difficult for prospective clients to find Titchenell’s band.
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“Prior to the defendant’s recent rise in notoriety, a search of the name of Jellyroll … returned references to the plaintiff,” his lawyers write in their complaint, obtained by Billboard. “Now, any such search on Google returns multiple references to defendant, perhaps as many as 18-20 references, before any reference to plaintiff’s entertainment dance band known as Jellyroll can be found.”
News of the lawsuit against Jelly Roll was first reported by Court Watch.
Titchnell claims he’s been using the name for his band since 1980. In a 2019 Inquirer article marking the band’s 40th anniversary, the newspaper described Jellyroll as a group that nearly every Philadelphian has likely heard at some point, at one of thousands of weddings, galas and other public events.
In media interviews, Jelly Roll has said that his mother gave him the nickname as a child. He used the name on a 2003 self-released mixtape called The Plain Shmear Tape, and then on dozens of subsequent releases over nearly two-decades as a little-known Nashville rapper.
The two artists appear to have peacefully co-existed until recently, when Jelly Roll climbed the charts and became a household name. Following his breakout 2021 hit “Son of a Sinner” and last year’s “Need A Favor,” he was nominated for Best New Artist at this year’s Grammy Awards, and won a trio of major awards at this year’s Country Music Awards.
In Monday’s lawsuit, Titchenell’s attorneys say they sent a cease-and-desist letter to Jelly Roll in February, which led to “several conversations” over the naming issue. But they say no resolution was reached – and they even suggested that they felt insulted in the process: “At one point defendant’s counsel inquired as to whether defendant really was in competition with plaintiff.”
Now, they’re seeking an immediate court order that would stop him from using the name “Jelly Roll.” They specifically pointed to an upcoming concert at Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center in October.
“Despite his receipt of a demand to cease and desist using plaintiff’s registered service mark, defendant has ignored this demand and continues to use plaintiff’s registered service mark knowing that it continues to irreparably harm plaintiff but has nevertheless callously disregarded the rights of plaintiff to his own service mark,” Titchenell’s attorneys write.
An attorney for Jelly Roll did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
When licensing negotiations between TikTok and the Universal Music Group collapsed at the end of January, many official recordings from UMG artists vanished from the platform. UMG chief digital officer/executive vp Michael Nash told financial analysts in February that the company had been “providing notices to effectuate the muting of millions of videos every day for the last two weeks.” Yet a number of songs connected to UMG — or its publishing wing, Universal Music Publishing Group — remain available on TikTok anyway.
Some are user uploads, which might theoretically be harder to find and take down or mute. Others are official tracks, including recent releases from prominent stars and fast-moving viral hits. And much of Taylor Swift’s catalog returned to TikTok on Thursday (April 11), raising the question of how other artists may be able to find workarounds while the licensing dispute continues.
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One possible reason that some songs are staying on TikTok: Several artist lawyers tell Billboard they are devising contractual carve-outs to allow their clients to keep their music on the platform. Others note that even though they haven’t added these clauses to recording agreements yet, it has become a topic of conversation with their clients.
“Some labels are allowing some of their artists to exclude newly created music from the grant of rights until the label has a deal in place” with TikTok, says David Fritz, founding partner at Boyarski Fritz. “Because the issue is so new, we are developing on the fly to meet the needs of talent — songwriters and artists — that want their music on TikTok. This is an issue, and workaround, that came about solely as a result of UMG taking down its catalog from TikTok.”
Reps for UMG and TikTok declined to comment.
Some artists have invested years of their life building a following on TikTok. (Predecessor Musical.ly was acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and then relaunched in the United States as TikTok the year after.) For more than two months now, they’ve been unable to share official recordings with those fans on the platform — the same fans who may have earned them their major-label deal in the first place.
“Some artists are concerned about this,” says Josh Binder, founding partner at Rothenberg Mohr & Binder. “They don’t want to be uncompetitive, unable to use TikTok to muster up an audience.”
“TikTok is mostly used as a new-music discovery tool — discover a clip on TikTok, listen to it on a DSP,” Fritz adds. “So those who are trying to get their music discovered are the most concerned” about being unable to promote new songs on the app.
In 2022, MIDiA Research found that TikTok was the second-biggest driver of music discovery for Gen Z, after YouTube. In recent months, TikTok popularity has helped little-known acts like Dasha, Good Neighbours and the Red Clay Strays explode at streaming services — leading to major-label deals — and contributed to breakout hits for Djo, Flo Milli and Benson Boone, among others.
UMG pushed back against the idea that TikTok has a lock on discovery during its most recent earnings call. Chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge told financial analysts that TikTok was “not a material part of the multidisciplinary jigsaw where we promote and market our music globally.” And UMG CFO/executive vp Boyd Muir said that UMG would “focus on accelerating [its] partnerships” with other social media platforms, including Meta, Snap and YouTube, to provide alternative promotional avenues for its artists.
But the job of an artist lawyer — a good one, at least — is to help their client get what they want. Labels typically aim to control as many rights as they can for as long as they can. In the modern music business, artists have more ability to push back; because they can generate momentum on their own, without a record company’s help, more aspects of a record deal are negotiable. “You can cherry-pick what you want to be in your contract to some degree,” Scott Booker, the longtime manager of The Flaming Lips, recently told Billboard.
As with any negotiation, artists’ ability to get their preferred terms comes down to their leverage — for stars especially, there are few rules that can’t be bent — and the skill of the lawyers involved. “If you successfully reserve the right to license to TikTok directly in your contract with UMG, you would be able to do so directly or via a third-party service,” says Leon Morabia, a partner at Mark Music & Media Law. “It would be a difficult point to win in a deal, but it is contractually feasible.”
Josh Love, partner at Reed Smith, says he has been able to get “a carve-out” in the past that allowed an artist “to do a direct license with a DSP” — a digital service provider like TikTok or another social media or streaming service — “if the label or distributor is ever not licensed with that DSP and [the artist] wants to remain on the platform.” This is meant to act as interim coverage for an artist; if the label or distributor were to form a new licensing agreement, that would likely supersede that deal made between the artist and the DSP in the meantime.
Some clauses that are already in record deals could also be expanded by artist attorneys to ensure their clients’ music remains available on TikTok. “Release commitments,” for example, are put in place to “force the label to guarantee that a record will be released within certain months after delivery so that the artist’s record doesn’t get ’shelved,’ with the artist stuck in the deal,” says Gandhar Savur, a music attorney.
These clauses have become increasingly comprehensive, stretching “to cover commitments by the label over more specific aspects of the release — the exact countries in which the album will be distributed, formats that the album will be released in such as vinyl and digital, and even including specific major DSPs by name like Spotify and Apple Music.” After negotiations between UMG and TikTok unraveled, Savur continues, “it would be a natural response that artist attorneys will gradually start to require release commitments to cover all platforms generally so that if a label is not licensed with a particular platform for any reason, the artist can deal with that platform directly.”
Savur believes that artists who are signed to labels that are distributed by UMG, rather than signed directly, probably have more latitude to try to deal with platforms like TikTok on their own. “Although I believe that what Universal is doing overall is a good thing for the industry, Universal-distributed labels might be more sympathetic to their artists’ desire to stay on TikTok because the increased streaming and ticket sales [that] result from any tracks going viral on the platform can be a big win for the artist and label alike,” Savur says.
If the UMG-TikTok deadlock rolls on, Fritz says, “smart lawyers” with leverage will find “a workaround that enables their clients to continue to use the most popular discovery tool while the large-scale license gets worked out.”
NewJeans is asking an American court to force Google to unmask an anonymous YouTube user so that the person can be criminally prosecuted under South Korea’s strict libel laws for posting “false and defamatory videos” about the K-pop band.
In court documents filed last month, attorneys for NewJeans requested that a California federal judge issue a subpoena requiring Google to reveal the user’s identity. The band wants the info because they are seeking criminal charges in South Korea – a far more serious penalty for defamation than exists under U.S. law.
“The applicants are members of a female K-Pop group, who have come under attack by an anonymous individual posting false and defamatory videos on YouTube,” the group’s lawyer wrote in the March 27 petition, which was obtained by Billboard. “Unfortunately, without the YouTuber’s personally identifiable information the criminal case cannot be fully prosecuted.”
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The band’s target is the anonymous owner of a YouTube account called “7th Grade in Middle School,” which attorneys for NewJeans say has “engaged in name-calling or other mocking behavior” and has posted as many as 33 defamatory videos that have been viewed more than 13 million times. They cited one particularly “derogatory” post, which allegedly claimed that NewJeans member Min-ji Kim was the “eldest daughter of a Vietnamese farmer.”
HYBE, the parent company of NewJeans’ label ADOR, did not immediately return a request for comment on the legal proceedings. The recent court filings, which were refiled in court last week, were first reported by The New York Times.
The case illustrates striking differences between U.S. and South Korean protections for free speech. Under American law, defamation is a civil wrong that can lead to damages, but one that’s sharply limited by the First Amendment. To win such a case, public figures like the members of NewJeans would need to prove that the YouTube user knowingly made false statements, a burden that’s intentionally difficult to satisfy.
In South Korea, on the other hand, defamation is a criminal offense that can be “punished by imprisonment with labor for up to seven years,” and even fully true statements can face criminal penalties. In 2015, a United Nations watchdog called out South Korea‘s “increasing use of criminal defamation laws to prosecute persons who criticize government action.” In 2022, a U.S. State Department report warned that public figures in Korea had used the country’s libel laws to “restrict public discussion and harass, intimidate, or censor private and media expression.”
NewJeans isn’t the first K-pop group to use those laws. In 2019, HYBE (then Big Hit Entertainment) filed criminal defamation cases over BTS, alleging the targets had behind “personal attacks” on the band. In 2022, Big Hit did so again over “malicious postings” about BTS, asking the group’s famous fan “army” to help gather evidence. YG Entertainment, the label behind Blackpink, has also filed its own complaint against “internet trolls,” accusing them of “spreading groundless rumours about our singers.”
According to the recent U.S. court filings, NewJeans’ label ADOR filed a criminal complaint with police in Seoul in March, but the case has stalled because they cannot identify the actual person behind the YouTube account. The group’s attorneys say they sent a request for such information to Google, but that the American tech giant has refused to hand it over.
A spokesman for Google declined to comment when reached by Billboard on Thursday. In a policy statement regarding government requests for personal information, the company says: “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all.”
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: Mary J. Blige’s 1992 “Real Love” draws a new copyright case over an oft-sampled funk song with a long history in both hip hop and music law; Madonna strikes back against angry fans who sued over delayed concerts; Morgan Wallen is charged with multiple felonies after allegedly throwing a chair from the roof of a Nashville bar; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Sampling Saga
If you’ve listened to any significant amount of rap music over the past 30 years, you’ve probably heard “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers — a legendary piece of hip-hop source material with a drum track that’s been sampled or interpolated literally hundreds of times, including by Run-DMC, Biggie, Tupac, Dr. Dre and many others.
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And, allegedly, by Mary J. Blige.
In a lawsuit filed last week, Tuff City Records claimed that Blige’s 1992 classic “Real Love,” which spent 31 weeks on the Hot 100 in 1992, featured an unlicensed sample from “Impeach.” The case claims that Universal Music Publishing has “repeatedly refused” to pay for the underlying composition, even though UMG Recordings has already agreed to a deal covering the master.
The new lawsuit is the latest chapter in a story dating back several decades, starting with a seminal 1991 case over an LL Cool J song that also featured “Impeach” – a legal battle that would ultimately prove to be the beginning of fundamental changes to how the music industry and the courts treated sampling.
Other top stories this week…
MADONNA CONCERT CLASH – The Material Girl fired back at a class action lawsuit filed by New York City fans who are angry that her concerts started later than scheduled, asking for the case to be dismissed. Madonna’s attorneys argued that needing to “wake up early the next day for work” is not the kind of “cognizable injury” someone can sue over, and that “no Madonna fan” has a “reasonable expectation” that her shows will start on time.
LAST NIGHT (ALLEGEDLY) – Morgan Wallen was arrested in Nashville and charged with three felony counts of reckless endangerment over accusations that he threw a chair off the six-story roof of a popular bar on the city’s bustling Broadway street, allegedly narrowly missing several police officers. He was later released on bond, and his lawyer told Billboard he was “cooperating fully with authorities.”
RAMONES MOVIE LAWSUIT – Joey Ramone‘s brother (Mickey Leigh) responded to a lawsuit filed by Johnny Ramone’s widow (Linda Cummings-Ramone) over a planned Netflix movie about the pioneering punk band, calling the case “baseless and flimsy” and arguing that she actually signed off on such a project years ago.
AI COPYRIGHT DISCLOSURE BILL – Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) introduced new legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works were used to train their models, or face a financial penalty. The measure would not directly require payment to artists, but would certainly make it easier for copyright owners to file infringement cases against AI companies demanding such compensation.
NEW DIDDY ABUSE CASE – Sean “Diddy” Combs was hit with yet another sexual abuse case, this time centering on allegations that his son Christian “King” Combs assaulted a staffer on a luxury yacht in the Caribbean. The case, one of many against Diddy over the past six months, claimed that he “encouraged an environment of debauchery” that enabled his son’s behavior.
ACCUSER’S LAWYER CRITICIZED – Tyrone Blackburn, an attorney who has filed two of the pending sexual abuse cases against Combs, could be facing potential discipline himself. In a scathing ruling last week, a federal judge in an unrelated lawsuit referred him to the court’s grievance committee over his “pattern of behavior” in which he allegedly “improperly files cases in federal court to garner media attention, embarrass defendants with salacious allegations, and pressure defendants to settle quickly.”
ROD WAVE ARRESTED OVER SHOOTING – The rapper was arrested on gun charges in Florida over alleged connections to a shooting last month at a sports bar in St. Petersburg. At a press conference after the arrest, police claimed that the alleged assailants used a getaway car registered to Wave and fled to a house he had rented, where they later discovered two assault rifles and other evidence.
MORE BIZARRE DONDA CLAIMS – Kanye West was hit with another lawsuit filed by a former employee at his Donda Academy, this time accusing him of discriminating against Black staffers. Like the several previous cases from former staffers, the case included bizarre allegations about conditions inside the school – including that West told students to “shave their heads” and that he “intended to put a jail at the school” where students could be “locked in cages.”
Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) introduced new legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday (April 9) which, if passed, would require AI companies to disclose which copyrighted works were used to train their models, or face a financial penalty. Called the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, the new bill would apply to both new models and retroactively to previously released and used generative AI systems.
The bill requires that a full list of copyrighted works in an AI model’s training data set be filed with the Copyright Office no later than 30 days before the model becomes available to consumers. This would also be required when the training data set for an existing model is altered in a significant manner. Financial penalties for non-compliance would be determined on a case-by-case basis by the Copyright Office, based on factors like the company’s history of noncompliance and the company’s size.
Generative AI models are trained on up to trillions of existing works. In some cases, data sets, which can include anything from film scripts to news articles to music, are licensed from copyright owners, but often these models will scrape the internet for large swaths of content, some of which is copyrighted, without the consent or knowledge of the author. Many of the world’s largest AI companies have publicly defended this practice, calling it “fair use,” but many of those working in creative industries take the position that this is a form of widespread copyright infringement.
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The debate has sparked a number of lawsuits between copyright owners and AI companies. In October, Universal Music Group, ABKCO, Concord Music Group, and other music publishers filed a lawsuit against AI giant Anthropic for “unlawfully” exploiting their copyrighted song lyrics to train AI models.
“In the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works,” wrote lawyers for the music companies at the time. “Publishers embrace innovation and recognize the great promise of AI when used ethically and responsibly. But Anthropic violates these principles on a systematic and widespread basis.”
While many in the music business are also calling for compensation and the ability to opt in or out of being used in a data set, this bill focuses only on requiring transparency with copyrighted training data. Still, it has garnered support from many music industry groups, including the Recorded Industry Association of America (RIAA), National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), ASCAP, Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC), and Human Artistry Campaign.
It is also supported by other creative industry groups, including the Professional Photographers of America, SAG-AFTRA, Writers Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and more.
“AI has the disruptive potential of changing our economy, our political system, and our day-to-day lives,” said Rep. Schiff in a statement. “We must balance the immense potential of AI with the crucial need for ethical guidelines and protections. My Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act is a pivotal step in this direction. It champions innovation while safeguarding the rights and contributions of creators, ensuring they are aware when their work contributes to AI training datasets. This is about respecting creativity in the age of AI and marrying technological progress with fairness.”
A number of rights groups also weighed in on the introduction of the bill.
“Any effective regulatory regime for AI must start with one of the most fundamental building blocks of effective enforcement of creators’ rights — comprehensive and transparent record keeping,” adds RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow. “RIAA applauds Congressman Schiff for leading on this urgent and foundational issue.”
“We commend Congressman Schiff for his leadership on the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act,” NMPA president/CEO David Israelite said. “AI only works because it mines the work of millions of creators every day and it is essential that AI companies reveal exactly what works are training their data. This is a critical first step towards ensuring that AI companies fully license and that songwriters are fully compensated for the work being used to fuel these platforms.”
“Without transparency around the use of copyrighted works in training artificial intelligence, creators will never be fairly compensated and AI tech companies will continue stealing from songwriters,” ASCAP CEO Elizabeth Matthews said. “This bill is an important step toward ensuring that the law puts humans first, and we thank Congressman Schiff for his leadership.”
“Protecting the work of music creators is essential, and this all begins with transparency and tracking the use of copyrighted materials in generative AI,” Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) co-chair Willie “Prophet” Stiggers said. “BMAC hopes Rep. Schiff’s Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act helps garner support for this mission and that author and creator rights continue to be protected and preserved.”
“Congressman Schiff’s proposal is a big step forward towards responsible AI that partners with artists and creators instead of exploiting them,” Human Artistry Campaign senior advisor Dr. Moiya McTier said. “AI companies should stop hiding the ball when they copy creative works into AI systems and embrace clear rules of the road for recordkeeping that create a level and transparent playing field for the development and licensing of genuinely innovative applications and tools.”
Morgan Wallen was arrested and jailed on Sunday night (April 7) in Nashville after the chart-topping country singer allegedly hurled a chair off the six-story roof of a popular bar on the city’s bustling Broadway street. On Monday morning (April 8), Billboard received a statement from Wallen’s attorney, Worrick Robinson of Worrick Robinson Law, confirming […]
