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Mathew Rosengart, a powerhouse litigator whose resume includes clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter and a stint as a Department of Justice trial attorney, has a stable of high-profile Hollywood clients like Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Sean Penn and Casey Affleck. But it’s his work with Britney Spears in successfully freeing the pop superstar from a controversial, restrictive and highly scrutinized 13-year conservatorship that catapulted the Greenberg Traurig partner into something of a household name and globally recognized legal eagle.
In a swift four months, from July to November 2021, Rosengart dove headfirst into the probate court case after being handpicked by the singer herself with one goal in mind — to free Spears from the arrangement that limited her rights and left all life decisions in the hands of a team led by her father Jamie Spears. Rosengart accomplished that on Nov. 12, 2021, when L.A. County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny granted a petition to terminate the conservatorship. Over the past three years, Rosengart remained on the case to settle loose ends while resolving an ongoing legal dispute with the singer’s father, Jamie Spears, over his attorney’s fees. The latter matter was resolved two months ago, bringing a quieter end to the entire ordeal but delivering an exclamation point nonetheless.
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There’s no active litigation at this time, Rosengart has said. “As she desired, her freedom now includes that she will no longer need to attend or be involved with court or entangled with legal proceedings in this matter,” he explained in a statement issued on April 26.
As such, Rosengart is closing the chapter as Spears’ litigator of record as he shifts focus toward to other clients. “It has been an honor to serve as Britney’s litigator, to work with her to achieve her goals in obtaining the court-ordered suspension of her former conservator, followed by restoring her fundamental rights and civil liberties, while continuing to protect her and more recently to extricate her from all outstanding litigation and the byzantine probate court proceedings. As I’ve always said, the credit goes to Britney,” Rosengart says in a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.
Rosengart’s work with Spears over these past three years extended beyond the conservatorship as he emerged wearing many hats as a trusted counsel and point of contact in a number of high-profile negotiations and situations. It is understood, however, that his role in her life was always as a litigator and such an arrangement would always have an end date.
Rosengart played a key role in shepherding a number of deals and developments in Spears’ life. Those included a massive Simon & Schuster book deal for her best-selling memoir The Woman in Me, a prenuptial agreement and subsequent divorce with ex-husband Sam Asghari, a restraining order against ex-husband Jason Alexander (who attempted to crash her Asghari wedding) and more. In May, following an incident at Chateau Marmont that reportedly left her with an ankle injury, Spears credited Rosengart with helping her through the aftermath. “This man is wonderful!!! He’s like a father to me,” she posted. “I adore you and admire you mister Matthew!!!”
For his work, Spears has repeatedly and profusely praised Rosengart through multiple Instagram posts (her primary source of public commentary) and in The Woman in Me. Rosengart has also been hailed as a hero by the pop star’s legions of fans, a group that doggedly propelled the #FreeBritney movement. Though the attention, compliments and numerous accolades and awards may have been a surprise for Rosengart, it wasn’t completely new. Rosengart once triumphed on behalf of Penn in a defamation case against Lee Daniels, and the Oscar-winning actor has since praised his lawyer as a “tough-as-nails street fighter with a big brain and bigger principles.”
He previously told THR that he leaned on those principles when taking the case. “I’ve always detested bullying, even growing up,” he told THR. “Bullying a woman is even more unacceptable and abhorrent. It was troubling to me both personally and professionally, and I felt I could help stop it, as a lawyer and otherwise. That’s a pledge I made, and it was really rewarding to be able to help.”
Spears’ life started to change in June 2021, when, for the first time, the singer addressed the court herself, by phone, during a conservatorship hearing. Spears spent more than 20 minutes unloading to Judge Brenda Penny in a scorching declaration of life under the “abusive” restrictions she’d been under since 2008. “It is my wish and my dream for all of this to end,” said Spears who requested during prepared remarks that she be able to hire an attorney of her choosing rather than continue with conservatorship-approved counsel Samuel Ingham.
Within days, on July 10, 2021, Rosengart made his way to Spears’ residence where, in a pool house, they met to discuss a plan that would see the powerhouse litigator and former Department of Justice trial attorney to take the case. The court approved his appointment in July, and in a swift four months Spears’ wish was granted. On Nov. 12, 2021, Judge Penny granted a petition to terminate the 13-year arrangement in a landmark probate court decision, delivering a seismic shift for Spears that freed her from the conservatorship and opened her life in a way that left her future open ended.
Last October, California Gov. Mathew Rosengart signed Senate Bill 43 that updated the state’s conservatorship laws for the first time in half a century. The bill was designed to give individuals protected rights while also increasing transparency on the process.
When the conservatorship was terminated that day in November, Rosengart fielded a question from reporters outside the court house in Downtown Los Angeles. “What’s next for Britney?” asked a journalist, to which Rosengart replied, “What’s next for Britney — and this is the first time this could be said for about a decade — is up to one person: Britney.”
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
A California judge is refusing — for now — to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Village People against Disney that claims the Hollywood giant blackballed the legendary disco band from performing at Walt Disney World.
In a ruling issued Friday (June 21), San Diego County Superior Judge Katherine Bacal ruled that the Village People could move forward with the case, which accuses Disney of violating state laws and committing fraud by placing a “do not book edict” on the group.
Disney had argued that it has a First Amendment right to hire — or to not hire — any band it chooses, citing a special California law designed to protect free speech. But in her ruling last week, the judge said the company had failed to prove that the statute applied to the case.
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Importantly, the decision does not mean the Village People will win the lawsuit. Instead, Bacal merely rejected Disney’s request to dismiss the case at the earliest stage. The two sides will now proceed to discovery and an eventual trial, where the band will need to fully prove its claims.
A spokesperson for Disney did not immediately return a request for comment.
Karen Willis, the wife of Village People lead singer Victor Willis, filed the case in September, claiming that Disney had broken the law by “outright refusing to seriously consider the group” for bookings at the Orlando, Fla., theme park: “This unfair business practice by Disney denied Village People an opportunity to fairly compete for a slot to perform at Disney,” the complaint read.
Though the case targets Disney, the lawsuit appears to be rooted in a dispute between members of the original Village People lineup over who gets to perform under the iconic name.
According to court filings, Willis returned to the group in 2017 and formed a “re-vamped version” of the Village People — in the process, replacing an existing lineup that had been touring under the name for years. The case claims that the earlier iteration, featuring two other original members, “did not go away quietly,” and that they “took offense” when Willis’ Village People took over their existing slot at Disney World for a series of 2018 performances.
After the spurned members allegedly contacted Disney to complain and “started a campaign” against the new band, the lawsuit claims that Disney “engaged in a series of outrageous and egregious conduct,” including failing to provide security and refusing to properly pay the act.
After Willis complained about being “treated very badly” during the new band’s 2018 run at the park, the lawsuit claims, Disney has since refused to rebook the group — imposing an effective ban on performing at the theme park. The lawsuit includes claims of breach of contract, unfair competition, fraud and conspiracy.
Ahead of last week’s ruling, Disney had argued that the case must be tossed out under California’s so-called anti-SLAPP provision — a law designed to quickly dismiss meritless lawsuits that threaten free speech. The studio argued that deciding which concerts to book was a form of constitutionally protected free speech rights and that it had the legal right to refuse to book the Village People.
Though Disney could very well still defeat the lawsuit, Bacal ruled on Friday that the company had failed to meet the specific legal requirements to use the anti-SLAPP law. In particular, the judge said Disney had failed to show that the dispute in the case was linked to the kind of “public conversation” that’s protected under the statute.
“There is no indication that defendants’ statements entered the public sphere,” Bacal wrote. “Defendants have not shown that the alleged statements contributed to or furthered the public conversation on an issue of public interest.”
LONDON — Scottish indie rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain and Robert Fripp, a founder member of British prog rock act King Crimson, are among a group of musicians and songwriters who have filed a joint lawsuit against U.K. collecting society PRS for Music over how it licenses and administers their live performance rights, accusing the organization of a “lack of transparency” and “unreasonable” terms for its members.
According to legal papers filed at London’s High Court, which have been viewed by Billboard, the 10 claimants are suing PRS for Music for damages resulting from what they describe as “unnecessary contractual requirements and practices.”
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These include PRS placing a number of “unreasonable” obstructions on members who wish to withdraw their live public performance rights and instead strike their own direct licensing deals with promoters, venues or festivals, say attorneys.
The claimants also accuse PRS for Music — which represents the rights of more than 160,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers — of charging higher administration fees to smaller acts than some of its most popular and highest-grossing songwriter members, thus creating a two-tier system where the most successful musicians are effectively being subsidized by the rest of PRS’s membership.
Such preferential treatment goes against the society’s mandate as a collective management organization, say the claimants. As part of their legal action, they cite internal PRS figures that, according to a spokesperson, indicate that rights holders participating in the organization’s Major Live Concert Service — which handles royalty administration for acts playing venues with a capacity of above 5,000 people — can pay an average administration fee effective to 0.2% while the wider PRS membership pays 23%, proportionately around 115 times more.
The lawsuit additionally accuses PRS of deliberately withholding information from its members about deductions from their royalty income when their rights are licensed internationally. This lack of transparency means writers are unable to make fully informed decisions about licensing their rights, say the claimants’ attorneys, who accuse the London-based collecting society of “not acting in their [members’] best interests.”
The lawsuit is being led by Pace Rights Management, a direct competitor to PRS for Music, which licenses and administers live performance rights for composers, lyricists, songwriters, publishers and other rights-holders.
Also listed among the 10 claimants are five members of the band Haken; The Jesus and Mary Chain’s founders and core duo, Jim and William Reid; and Fripps’ King Crimson bandmate Michael Jaksyk.
In a joint statement, the ten claimants say that PRS has repeatedly refused to discuss or “constructively engage” with their complaints over a period of several years and accuse the society of straying “significantly from the principles on which it was founded 110 years ago, to the point that the organisation’s policies no longer appear to be operating in the best interests of its members.”
“Regretfully,” the claimants’ statement continues, “we have been left with no option but to seek redress through the courts. The ball is now firmly in PRS’s court. Either they constructively engage with much needed reforms to empower and benefit writers and publishers, or they continue to resist these necessary changes, and attempt to defend the indefensible.”
“I am yet to be persuaded that the PRS operates on behalf of the membership’s best interests,” added Fripp in a statement.
In response, PRS for Music said that it “fundamentally” rejects the allegations and “will be vigorously defending the society against these claims.”
“PRS for Music has consistently sought constructive dialogue with PACE for many years, proposing and implementing solutions to the issues raised,” said the organization in a statement, which accused PACE of itself failing to engage with PRS to find a solution.
“This has resulted in royalties being unnecessarily withheld from PRS members for the live performance of their works at concerts and also created complexity and uncertainty for live music venues and promoters,” the society hit back.
Referring to the terms of its Major Live Concert Service (MLCS), PRS said the initiative was “just one part of a wide range of services” which it provides to members at different stages of their career, including songwriting camps, mentoring schemes and touring and hardship grants for new acts. Last year, the organization paid out £943 million in royalties to its members.
“Given PRS for Music’s sincere efforts to engage constructively, it is disappointing that PACE has taken the step to issue proceedings against us,” said PRS for Music.
On Monday (June 24), the three major music companies filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence (AI) music startups Suno and Udio, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” Spearheaded by the RIAA, the two similar lawsuits arrived four days after Billboard first reported that the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two startups.
Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
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Hours later, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman responded to the lawsuit with a statement sent to Billboard. “Suno’s mission is to make it possible for everyone to make music,” he said. “Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists. We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook. Suno is built for new music, new uses, and new musicians. We prize originality.”
An RIAA spokesperson fired back at Shulman’s comment, saying: “Suno continues to dodge the basic question: what sound recordings have they illegally copied? In an apparent attempt to deceive working artists, rightsholders, and the media about its technology, Suno refuses to address the fact that its service has literally been caught on tape — as part of the evidence in this case — doing what Mr. Shulman says his company doesn’t do: memorizing and regurgitating the art made by humans. Winners of the streaming era worked cooperatively with artists and rightsholders to properly license music. The losers did exactly what Suno and Udio are doing now.”
Udio responded on Tuesday (June 25) with a lengthy statement posted to the company’s website. You can read it in full below.
In the past two years, AI has become a powerful tool for creative expression across many media – from text to images to film, and now music. At Udio, our mission is to empower artists of all kinds to create extraordinary music. In our young life as a company, we have sat in the studios of some of the world’s greatest musicians, workshopped lyrics with up-and-coming songwriters, and watched as millions of users created extraordinary new music, ranging from the funny to the profound.
We have heard from a talented musician who, after losing the ability to use his hands, is now making music again. Producers have sampled AI-generated tracks to create hit songs, like ‘BBL Drizzy’, and everyday music-lovers have used the technology to express the gamut of human emotions from love to sorrow to joy. Groundbreaking technologies entail change and uncertainty. Let us offer some insight into how our technology works.
Generative AI models, including our music model, learn from examples. Just as students listen to music and study scores, our model has “listened” to and learned from a large collection of recorded music.
The goal of model training is to develop an understanding of musical ideas — the basic building blocks of musical expression that are owned by no one. Our system is explicitly designed to create music reflecting new musical ideas. We are completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set, and in fact, have implemented and continue to refine state-of-the-art filters to ensure our model does not reproduce copyrighted works or artists’ voices.
We stand behind our technology and believe that generative AI will become a mainstay of modern society.
Virtually every new technological development in music has initially been greeted with apprehension, but has ultimately proven to be a boon for artists, record companies, music publishers, technologists, and the public at large. Synthesizers, drum machines, digital recording technology, and the sound recording itself are all examples of once-controversial music creation tools that were feared in their early days. Yet each of these innovations ultimately expanded music as an art and as a business, leading to entirely new genres of music and billions of dollars in the pockets of artists, songwriters and the record labels and music publishers who profit from their creations.
We know that many musicians — especially the next generation — are eager to use AI in their creative workflows. In the near future, artists will compose music alongside their fans, amateur musicians will create entirely new musical genres, and talented creators — regardless of means — will be able to scale the heights of the music industry.
The future of music will see more creative expression than ever before. Let us use this watershed moment in technology to expand the circle of creators, empower artists, and celebrate human creativity.
Amid an ugly divorce case, Billy Ray Cyrus is now claiming in new court filings that he was abused physically, verbally and emotionally by his soon-to-be-ex-wife Firerose.
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A week after Firerose (Johanna Rose Hodges) accused Cyrus of “psychological abuse” during their short-lived marriage, the singer fired back with his own filing on Monday – not only “vehemently” denying her allegations, but leveling his own claims of abusive behavior against his estranged wife.
“Defendant’s allegations of abuse were only made to sensationalize her false complaints by using the word abuse,” Cyrus’ lawyers write. “While the plaintiff would acknowledge that he was certainly vocal, frustrated and angry with the defendant in May 2024, it is the plaintiff who, in fact, has been abused. Not only verbally and emotionally by the defendant, but PHYSICALLY.”
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Cyrus filed for divorce on May 22, citing “irreconcilable differences” and “inappropriate marital conduct.” The pair, who first started dating in 2022 after years of friendship, were married for only 7 months before the split.
The proceedings have since turned nasty. In a June 13 filing, Cyrus filed an emergency motion accusing Firerose of nearly $100,000 in unauthorized “fraudulent” credit card charges and seeking a temporary restraining order to stop her. Her attorneys later said the accusations were “untrue.”
Then in a June 14 response to the complaint, Firerose claimed that she had been the “victim of extreme verbal, emotional, and psychological abuse. She claimed that Cyrus had been “unpredictable and volatile” due to substance abuse, and had filed for divorce just a day before she had been scheduled to undergo a preventive double mastectomy.
In his response filing on Monday, Cyrus argued that Firerose had scheduled the “elective” surgery as part of an ongoing threat to use the surgery to “ruin his longstanding career in the entertainment industry” if he chose to file for divorce. He claims that she at one point made the threat explicit, allegedly saying: “If you even think about divorcing me right now, I will tell everyone that you did it because of the double mastectomy and your career will be over.”
An attorney for Firerose did not immediately return a request for comment.
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: The world’s biggest music companies file lawsuits against AI music firms accusing them of stealing copyrighted music at “an “unimaginable scale”; a federal judge rules that Megan Thee Stallion didn’t copy her chart-topping “Savage” from an earlier song; the artist formerly known as Kanye West settles a copyright lawsuit filed by Donna Summer’s estate; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Major Labels Sue AI Music Cos. Over Training
In the latest battle between the music industry and artificial intelligence firms, the three major music companies filed lawsuits against AI startups Suno and Udio over allegations that they copyrighted music to train their models on an “unimaginable scale.” Like numerous other copyright cases already filed by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, the new lawsuits ask what could ultimately wind up being a trillion-dollar legal question: Is it copyright 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? The music business already picked that fight once, when major publishers sued AI giant Anthropic last year over its use of written lyrics to train AI models. (That case remains pending). But the new case, spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America, is the first to deal with sound and music itself, targeting two companies that are offering models that spit out full songs at the push of a button. 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 song 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 the new lawsuit, the record labels alleged that that success had been built on the backs of real human artists: “Since the day it launched, Udio has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service. Neither Udio, nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.” For more, go read Kristin Robinson’s full story on the new lawsuits, complete with access to the actual complaints filed against Suno and Udio. And stay tuned to Billboard for more updates as the two cases unfold in the federal courts…
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Other top stories this week…
MEGAN WINS COPYRIGHT CASE – A federal judge ruled that Megan Thee Stallion didn’t copy her chart-topping song “Savage” from an earlier song, saying the songs were “qualitatively different” and that there was no evidence the superstar has ever even heard the little-known instrumental track. SUMMER SAMPLE SETTLEMENT – Ye (formerly Kanye West) finalized a settlement with the estate of Donna Summer to resolve a copyright lawsuit that accused him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).” An attorney for the Summer estate confirmed to Billboard that the settlement did not include a license for West to legally re-release the offending track: “We got what we wanted.” YSL TRIAL DRAMA CONTINUES – Yak Gotti, one of Young Thug’s co-defendants in the YSL gang case in Atlanta, asked the Georgia Supreme Court to force Judge Ural Glanville to recuse himself from the ongoing trial, citing recent revelations about a secret meeting between the judge, prosecutors and a key witness. Gotti’s lawyers warned that the judge’s actions “offend public confidence in the independence, integrity, and impartiality of the judiciary.” ALBUM HACKING SUIT RESOLVED – Kelsea Ballerini reached a settlement to end her lawsuit against Bo Ewing, a superfan she had accused of hacking her and then leaking her unreleased album. Ballerini agreed to drop the case after Ewing promised to never again share or access the offending materials. MADONNA CASE CLOSED – Two Madonna fans dropped their lawsuit complaining about delayed starts to her concerts, but the star’s lawyers quickly clarified that the move was “not the result of any settlement.” Reiterating earlier claims that the lawsuit had been a “strike suit” aimed at extorting a settlement, Madonna’s attorneys say they might still seek legal sanctions against the lawyers who filed the “frivolous” case. PETTY DOC SPARKS LAWSUIT – A filmmaker named Martyn Atkins filed a lawsuitagainst Warner Music over the 2021 Tom Petty documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, claiming the movie featured 45 minutes of his copyrighted film footage of the late rock legend without permission or payment. Atkins claimed he had been “conned” into sharing the footage with the producers after they promised him the chance to direct the documentary.
Kelsea Ballerini has reached a settlement to end her lawsuit against a superfan she had accused of leaking her unreleased album, agreeing to drop the case after the alleged hacker promised to never again share the materials.
Ballerini sued Bo Ewing in April over accusations that he hacked her unfinished album and shared it with a fan club. The country star claimed Ewing — allegedly an ex-fan who had become disillusioned with her — had gained illegal “back-door access” to song still in production.
But Ewing’s lawyers quickly promised to stop sharing her songs and to name names of any people he’d already sent them to, suggesting he was unwilling to fight Ballerini’s lawsuit. And in a Monday filing signed by both sides, Ewing agreed to permanently be barred from leaking the star’s songs.
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“Defendant is enjoined from knowingly or purposefully accessing any unreleased recordings, unreleased performances, unreleased videos, or any other unreleased content created by, believed to have been created by, or otherwise associated with plaintiffs in any form,” the two sides wrote in a joint filing. “Defendant is enjoined further accessing any of the recordings that are the subject of this litigation and which defendant has affirmatively declared are no longer in his possession.”
In return for such an agreement, Ballerini asked the judge overseeing the case to dismiss her lawsuit permanently. Any other specific terms of the settlement, including potential monetary payments, were not disclosed in court filings. Neither side immediately returned requests for comment on Tuesday.
Ballerini filed the case in April, claiming she had been the victim of a “nefarious digital attack” carried out by “unscrupulous individuals seeking attention.” The leak not only undercut “the most critical time” for an album’s commercial success, her attorneys said, but also deprived her of her artistic agency.
“Ms. Ballerini and her team are the only people who can say when the recordings are complete,” her lawyers wrote at the time. “Defendant’s actions have stripped plaintiffs of that right and caused the distribution of unfinished work that may not yet be up to plaintiffs’ high professional standards.”
Almost immediately, though, Ewing agreed to play ball with Ballerini’s attorneys. In a filing just days after he was sued, he agreed to be bound by a preliminary injunction that required him divulge who he has already shared them with and how he came into possession of her music.
“Defendant shall, within thirty days of entry of this order, provide plaintiffs with the names and contact information for all people to whom defendant disseminated the recordings,” the agreement reads. “Defendant shall use his best efforts to disclose to Plaintiffs from whom and by what means he obtained the recordings.”
The names of any alleged co-leakers were not disclosed in court filings, and it’s unclear if Ballerini will take further legal action against any others who may have been involved the alleged hack.
A filmmaker is suing Warner Music over the 2021 Tom Petty documentary Somewhere You Feel Free, calling the movie a “brazen exploitation” that used nearly an hour of his copyrighted film footage without permission.
In a lawsuit filed last week in Los Angeles federal court, Martyn Atkins says he never gave the Somewhere producers consent to use hours of footage he filmed of the music legend during the 1990s but that the movie nonetheless contained “a shocking 45 minutes” of his materials.
“Atkins did not provide consent, did not otherwise license any of the footage, and was not compensated in any manner for the Film’s unauthorized, brazen exploitation of the works Atkins created and owns,” his attorneys wrote in a June 18 complaint.
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Released in March 2021, Somewhere You Feel Free promised viewers “never-before-seen footage” of Petty as he worked on his 1994 album Wildflowers. Much of the footage was filmed by Atkins, who served as art director for the album and says he often documented the proceedings with a 16mm camera. Later, Atkins says he and the music legend watched the footage and discussed eventually using it to create such a documentary.
But after Petty’s tragic death in 2017, the project didn’t come together until 2020, when Atkins says he was invited to a meeting with Petty’s daughter and other reps from his estate. After they promised him the job of directing the upcoming documentary, Atkins says, he provided them with a detailed breakdown of where he had stored the original footage at Warner Music’s storage facility.
But after that first encounter, he says he was “never asked to another meeting.”
“Atkins had been conned into believing he would produce and direct the film so that Atkins would reveal the location of his footage to defendants,” his lawyers write. “He was then cut out completely — in every imaginable respect. He was not even told as a courtesy that his works would be misappropriated and featured, let alone asked his consent.”
When he saw the movie, Atkins says he says he was shocked at what he saw: Roughly half of the movie’s 90-minute runtime was composed of his footage, including some of the “most compelling and iconic shots of Petty” in the movie. “Atkins simply could not believe it.”
A likely defense argument from Warner Music is that Atkins produced the footage as a so-called work-for-hire — a legal term meaning he created it at the request of someone else. If true, that would mean that even though Atkins filmed the footage, the rights to it were retained by Petty or the label. After all, he was the art director on Petty’s album and stored the film in Warner’s facilities.
But in his lawsuit, Atkins specifically aimed to preempt that argument: “The footage Atkins shot … was not subject to a work-for-hire or other such agreement. Atkins did not license the footage to Petty, Warner Records, any Warner Records affiliate, or anybody else. He was not acting as an employee of Petty or Warner Records, or any other party [and] here is no agreement in existence relating to any of the film footage.”
Beyond simply using the footage, the lawsuit claims that Somewhere‘s producers have “repeatedly misrepresented” that the footage was “magically and unexpectedly discovered” before the documentary was shot. “The film’s producers have systematically implemented this false narrative to manipulate the viewing public and bolster the marketing of the film,” the complaint reads.
In technical terms, the lawsuit names Warner Music unit WMG Productions LLC, as well as the film’s production company, Girl On LSD LLC. The lawsuit includes counts of direct and secondary copyright infringement and a claim that the defendants effectively stole his property.
Read the entire lawsuit here:
The three major music companies filed lawsuits against AI music companies Suno and Udio on Monday, alleging the widespread infringement of copyrighted sound recordings “at an almost unimaginable scale.” The lawsuits, spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), arrive four days after Billboard first reported the news the labels were seriously considering legal action against the two start-ups.
Filed by plaintiffs that include Sony Music, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, the lawsuits allege that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
“Building and operating [these services] requires at the outset copying and ingesting massive amounts of data to ‘train’ a software ‘model’ to generate outputs,” the lawyers for the major labels explain. “For [these services], this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies [to] generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings.”
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“Since the day it launched, Udio has flouted the rights of copyright owners in the music industry as part of a mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service,” the lawsuit against Udio reads. “Neither Udio, nor any other generative AI company, can be allowed to advance toward this goal by trampling the rights of copyright owners.”
The lawsuit is seeking both an injunction to bar the companies from continuing to train on the copyrighted songs, as well as damages from the infringements that have already taken place. Neither Suno nor Udio immediately returned requests for comment on Monday.
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most advanced and important players in the emerging field of generative AI music. While many competitors only create instrumentals or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio can generate all three in the click of a button with shocking precision. Udio has already produced what could be considered the first AI-generated hit song with the Drake diss track “BBL Drizzy,” which was generated on the platform by comedian King Willonius and popularized by a Metro Boomin remix. Suno has also achieved early success since its December 2023 launch, raising $125 million in funding from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies have declined to comment on whether or not unlicensed copyrights were part of their datasets. In a previous interview with Billboard, Udio co-founder David Ding said simply that the company trained on “good music.” However, in a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, founder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true across melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote.
The complaints against the two companies also make the case that copyrighted material was used to train these models. Some of the circumstantial evidence cited in the lawsuits include generated songs by Suno and Udio that sound just like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA; outputs that parrot the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo; and outputs that sound nearly identical to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot,” and more.
In a recent Rolling Stone profile of Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez admitted that the start-up does not have licenses for whatever music it has trained on but added that it was not a concern to him. Knowing that labels and publishers could sue was just “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
Many AI companies argue that training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law. Though fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to the “intermediate” use of millions of works to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations.
Anticipating that defense from Suno and Udio, the lawyers for the major labels argue that “[Suno and Udio] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.”
News of the complaints filed against Suno and Udio follow up a previous lawsuit that also concerned the use of copyrighted materials to train models without a license. Filed by UMG, Concord and ABKCO in October against Anthropic, a major AI company, that case focused more specifically on copied lyrics.
In a statement about the lawsuits, RIAA CEO and chairman Mitch Glazier says, “The music community has embraced AI and we are already partnering and collaborating with responsible developers to build sustainable AI tools centered on human creativity that put artists and songwriters in charge. But we can only succeed if developers are willing to work together with us. Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all.”
RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow adds, “These are straightforward cases of copyright infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound and lawful footing. These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end.”
Ye (formerly Kanye West) has finalized a settlement with the estate of Donna Summer to resolve a copyright lawsuit that accused him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).”
In court filings on Thursday, attorneys for both sides said they had “entered into a settlement agreement that is a full and final settlement of all of the claims in the action” and that each side would pay its own legal bills from the dispute. Neither side immediately returned requests for more information on the specific terms of the agreement.
The final settlement, first announced in court filings last month, comes less than four months after Summer’s estate sued the rapper for allegedly interpolating her track in “Good,” which he released on his chart-topping Vultures 1 album.
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Making good on threats to sue issued publicly weeks earlier, the estate’s attorneys claimed at the time that the rapper had “shamelessly used instantly recognizable portions” of her song in his track, despite the fact that her estate had already “explicitly denied” him authorization to do so.
“Summer’s estate … wanted no association with West’s controversial history and specifically rejected West’s proposed use,” her attorneys write. “In the face of this rejection, defendants arrogantly and unilaterally decided they would simply steal ‘I Feel Love’ and use it without permission.”
The Summer estate’s lawyers say Ye re-recorded “almost verbatim” the key portions of her song and then used them as the hook for his own. The estate claims the songs were so similar that fans and critics “instantly recognized” his track as a “blatant rip-off.” The lawsuit also named album collaborator Ty Dolla $ign (Tyrone William Griffin Jr.) as a defendant.
Before the case was even filed, “Good” had been pulled from streaming platforms and removed from digital download versions of the album. As of Friday, the song is still not included on Vultures 1 on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music, though it’s available on YouTube from unofficial accounts.
It is unclear if Thursday’s settlement will allow Ye’s song to return to official circulation, or merely resolve the allegations of past copyright infringement over its initial use of Summer’s song. Attorneys for Ye, Ty Dolla and the estate did not respond to messages asking about the status of the song.
But at least in their initial lawsuit, the Summer estate did not seem to open to collecting an ongoing royalty from the controversial rapper.
“This lawsuit is about more than Defendants’ mere failure to pay the appropriate licensing fee for using another’s musical property. It is also about the rights of artists to decide how their works are used and presented to the public, and the need to prevent anyone from simply stealing creative works when they cannot secure the right to use them legally.”
Ye has been sued repeatedly for uncleared samples and interpolations in his music.
In 2022, he was hit with a lawsuit claiming his song “Life of the Party” illegally sampled a song by the pioneering rap group Boogie Down Productions; accused in another case over allegations that he used an uncleared snippet of Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 house track “Move Your Body” in the song “Flowers”; and sued in a different case by a Texas pastor for allegedly sampling from his recorded sermon in “Come to Life.”
Before that, West and Pusha T were sued in 2019 for sampling George Jackson‘s “I Can’t Do Without You” on the track “Come Back Baby.” That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio snippet of a young girl praying in his 2016 song “Ultralight Beam.” Further back, West was hit with similar cases over allegedly unlicensed samples used in “New Slaves,” “Bound 2” and “My Joy.”
