Legal
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A year after the deadly disaster at Travis Scott‘s Astroworld festival on Nov. 5, 2021, event organizers and victims are still locked in sprawling litigation over the tragedy, with hundreds of millions in potential damages on the line and no quick end in sight.
Beginning just hours after the incident, more than 4,900 alleged victims have filed legal claims against Live Nation, Travis Scott and other festival organizers over the disaster at Astroworld, in which a crowd crush during Scott’s headlining performance left 10 dead and hundreds physically injured.
The cases claim the organizers were legally negligent in how they planned and conducted the event, including not providing enough security and having insufficient emergency protocols in place. One case, filed by the family of a boy who died that night, claimed Live Nation and Scott had “egregiously failed in their duty to protect the health, safety, and lives of those in attendance.”
Combined, the cases are seeking billions in damages over the disaster. Even if a final settlement comes no where close to that total — and it likely won’t — the huge potential penalties resulting such “mass tort” cases should serve a stark reminder for those planning future music festivals.
“In business situations there’s always a pressure to cut costs, but you can’t cut costs in a way that ends up costing people lives and limbs,” says Mark Geistfeld, a professor at New York University School of Law and an expert in such litigation. “The point of mass torts is that you need something out there to temper the profit motive.”
“These cases can be a real wake up call,” Geistfeld says. “Are we actually spending enough on security and things like that to make sure these kinds things don’t happen?”
The lawsuits over Astroworld were all filed individually by the different victims, but they’ve been consolidated before a single Texas state judge as a “multidistrict litigation” — a standard procedure aimed at avoiding the inefficiency of individually litigating many cases that share key similarities.
Such a move not only helps streamline the proceedings, but also could make it easier to reach a broad settlement with all victims, like the $800 million deal that ended similar litigation over a 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert festival.
“Settlements are the way these cases almost always end,” says Jay Tidmarsh, a professor at Notre Dame Law School and an expert in complex civil litigation. “They make sense because of the risks of loss on both sides as well as the cost of litigation.”
A year into the case over Astroworld, sources close to the litigation tell Billboard that the parties are currently in the midst of what is known as discovery — the laborious process during lawsuits in which each side hands over mountains of evidence to their opponents, like internal emails about how the event was planned. Requests for such info have been exchanged, and disputes over what should be disclosed will be hammered out by the judge in the months ahead.
The parties are also gearing up to start depositions, in which attorneys for each side will take testimony from the various figures in the case, potentially including victims themselves, witnesses to the disaster, people involved in planning and many others. Each side is also lining up their own “expert witnesses” — specialists and professionals who will offer dueling analysis on what went down at Astroworld.
That work could still take well over another year, given the sweeping scope of a case involving more than a dozen defendants and thousands of plaintiffs. But when discovery and depositions eventually wrap up, the case will likely head in one of two ways.
One is a quick settlement. Based on what gets disclosed during discovery, it could become apparent to attorneys for the organizers that they’re facing a very strong case. Or plaintiffs might get worried that their ultimate damages award might be limited, even after years of costly litigation.
“One way these cases go is what’s called global peace — a large settlement that will cover all of these claims,” Geistfeld says. “If the amount is right, it might just be better for both sides to take that route rather than go to case by case litigation.”
If the parties can’t reach such a deal, they’ll keep litigating. But they won’t just take all 4,900 cases to trial. Instead, the litigation will likely proceed toward what are known as “bellwethers” – a handful of trials over individual victims that aim to serve as a representative sample of the broader case.
In the bellwethers, the two sides will grapple over the core question in all the cases — whether the conduct of Live Nation, Scott or any of the other planners caused the injuries suffered by various concertgoers. As reported by Billboard last year, that question will turn on whether the planners could have seen such a disaster coming, and whether they then took the proper steps to avoid it.
No matter how those early cases play out, experts say the case is still likely to eventually end in a settlement. But the outcome of the bellwethers will play a huge role in decided how that deal is ultimately structured.
“What [bellwether trials] do is set a baseline for negotiation,” Tidmarsh says. “Say the plaintiffs lose almost all of the early cases, then the settlement value goes way down. Say they win millions, then the value goes way up.”
A federal jury in Texas decided Thursday (Nov. 3) that an internet service provider must pay the three major record labels and others more than $46 million in damages over music illegally downloaded by the company’s subscribers.
After a month-long trial, jurors found that Grande Communications was legally liable for copyright infringement committed by its users — and that it owed separate damages for each of the more than 1,400 songs that were pirated on the company’s network.
The case is one of several such cases filed by music companies against ISPs, aimed at forcing them to take more proactive steps to eliminate piracy on their networks. In 2019, the labels won a shocking $1 billion verdict against Cox Communications in a similar case.
Grande’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday on the verdict. Mitch Glazier, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, called it “the latest validation by US courts and juries that unchecked online infringement will not stand.”
“The jury’s strong action here sends an important message to Internet Service Providers,” Glazier said. “Artists, songwriters, rightsholders, fans and legitimate services all depend upon a healthy digital music ecosystem that effectively protects creative works online.”
Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment teamed up to sue Grande in 2017, claiming the company had put itself on the hook by failing to take action against users who repeatedly pirated music.
“Defendants have been notified that their internet customers have engaged in more than one million infringements,” attorneys for the labels wrote at the time, but “have permitted repeat infringers to use the Grande service to continue to infringe plaintiffs’ copyrights without consequence.”
Internet service providers are typically not liable for individual infringements by their millions of users, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor.” But starting in the mid-2010s, music companies began arguing that ISPs had forfeited that immunity by ignoring the DMCA’s requirement that they terminate “repeat infringers” from their network.
Starting with a landmark case filed by BMG Rights Management against Cox, those arguments have repeatedly proved successful. Major labels have filed similar cases against Cox, Charter, RCN and other ISPs in courts around the country, winning huge verdicts like the $1 billion award against Cox (which is currently pending on appeal).
Facing such a lawsuit, Grande fired back that the music industry was wrongfully trying to turn ISPs into “copyright police.” Grande said such claims should really be targeted at the actual people who steal music, but that record labels had stopped pursuing them “due to bad publicity.” That was a reference to a series of controversial lawsuits filed in the 2000s, including one that ordered a Boston college student to pay $675,000 for pirating just 30 songs.
But the federal judge overseeing the case denied Grande’s motions and sent the case to trial, which kicked off last month. Following Thursday’s verdict, the company can appeal the ruling — first by asking the judge to overturn it, and then by taking the case to a federal appeals court.
Read the verdict form here:
The U.S. Copyright Office is quietly proposing a new rule to make sure that songwriters who invoke their termination rights actually get paid their streaming royalties, overturning a previous “erroneous” policy that could potentially have kept sending money to former owners in perpetuity.
Starting in 2020, groups like the Recording Academy raised alarm bells that a policy adopted by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the entity that collects and distributes streaming royalties) might lead to a bizarre outcome: Even after a writer takes back control of their songs, royalties might still flow to the old publishers that no longer own them — forever.
In a new rule proposed last month, the agency said the MLC’s policy was based on an “erroneous understanding and application of current law.” Ordering the group to “immediately repeal its policy in full,” the Copyright Office’s says that when a songwriter gets their rights back, they should obviously start getting the royalties, too.
“It is not clear why the statute or the case law should be read as making one particular copyright owner the permanent recipient [of royalties] because it happened to be the owner immediately before termination occurred,” the agency wrote in the proposed rule, issued Oct. 19.
The proposed rule change was quickly hailed as a win for songwriters. In a statement to Billboard, Michelle Lewis of the Songwriters of North America said the ambiguity over termination had “created stress and uncertainty for many songwriters.” Todd Dupler, vp for advocacy & public policy at the Recording Academy, says the rule change is “big news” for songwriters.
“We’re very grateful to the Copyright Office for stepping in to do this,” Dupler says. “We think the reasoning is very clear and I think they’ve reached the correct outcome.”
The MLC did not return a request for comment on the Copyright Office’s proposed rule.
Termination empowers an author to reclaim the rights to their copyrighted work decades after selling them away. In the music business, if a songwriter sold a publisher the rights to a song that later became a smash hit, termination allows them to automatically to get those rights back years later (the rule kicks in between 35 and 56 years later, depending on when the song was sold). Created by Congress when it updated federal copyright law in 1976, termination was designed to level the playing field for creators, who usually lack leverage in negotiations with big companies and are often forced to fork over rights before they know they’re valuable.
But termination comes with an important exception. Even though a publisher must hand back the rights to the original song, they’re entitled to keep selling any existing “derivative works” they created when they owned it. That means that even after a songwriter wins back ownership of their song, they can’t suddenly send cease-and-desists over a famous sample, or sue over a movie that featured the song under a synch license. Those continue to be fair game, and any fees under existing licenses keep flowing back to their old publisher.
That exception makes sense; it would be unfair to let a terminating songwriter suddenly revoke existing licenses that were legal when they were granted. But it also creates difficult ambiguity for the MLC and its so-called blanket license — the streamlined system created by Music Modernization Act in 2018 to make it easier for digital services to get mechanical royalties to the right songwriters.
Say a songwriter terminates their publisher’s control of their music. The writer is now the owner of those songs — that’s easy to figure out. But by paying the MLC for access to the blanket license, Spotify arguably already has an existing license in place with the old publisher. So, isn’t the copy of the song on Spotify an existing derivative work? And shouldn’t the royalties from it continue to go to the old publisher under that license?
Under the MLC’s termination dispute resolution policy issued in 2021, it appeared that was the case. The rules seemed to choose who to pay based on when a song was uploaded to a digital streamer’s servers; if it was uploaded prior to when a songwriter invoked their termination right, the royalties would keep going to the old owner — seemingly forever.
The MLC’s approach was not intended as a scheme to hurt songwriters. According to the Copyright Office’s filing, the MLC saw it as a “middle ground,” aimed at preventing drawn-out disputes that would lock up royalty payments “to the disadvantage of both songwriters and publishers.”
But for the Recording Academy’s Dupler, the ultimate outcome still seemed at odds with the spirit of the Music Modernization Act, which he says was designed to “help songwriters get compensated fairly for their work.”
“It raised concerns for us that this ambiguity was going to have a negative impact on songwriters,” says Dupler. “We feel pretty confident that it was never the intent of Congress that songwriters wouldn’t be receiving those royalties after termination.”
In the new rule issued last month, the Copyright Office agreed with that sentiment. In a detailed legal analysis, the agency explained that services like Spotify and Apple Music were not creating “derivative works” when they uploaded songs to their servers, meaning there was no caveats that should be imposed on a songwriter’s termination. And even if there were, the office made clear that it did not matter anyhow, stating simply: “a terminated publisher is not entitled to post-termination blanket license royalties.”
“The Office concludes that the MLC’s termination dispute policy is inconsistent with the law,” the agency wrote. “The statute entitles the current copyright owner to the royalties under the blanket license.”
Under the new rule, it won’t matter who owned a song when it was first uploaded to a digital service. Instead, it would “make clear that the copyright owner of the musical work as of the end of the monthly reporting period is the one who is entitled to the royalties.”
The text of the Copyright Office’s proposed rule is available in its entirety on the agency’s website. The rule is now open to public comments, in which interested parties can either support the changes or offer opposition. Such groups have until Nov. 25 to weigh in.
A new New York City law requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings has officially gone into effect this week, with music companies hiring in the city mandated to comply. On the first day of the law, a picture of at least one of the major music companies’ salary ranges has come into focus.
The day the law went into effect, several companies were criticized for overly-broad salary ranges that effectively subverted the point of the regulation, which was designed to give prospective employees insight into what they could be expected to earn at different companies in the city and address salary discrepancies between men and women and for people of color. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, posted reporting and producing jobs with ranges between $40,000 to $160,000; tech jobs at Amazon were anywhere from $88,400 to $185,000; while Citigroup initially posted some job openings as between $0 and $2 million, before revising them to a range of $59,340 to $149,320.
Among the three major labels, only Warner Music Group (WMG) seems to have complied with the law as of yet. The company has 11 listed job openings on its website across its three locations in New York City, though 10 of them relate to its Spring 2023 WMG Emerging Talent Associate Program, a part-time paid internship program that lists a range from $15 to $30 an hour for between 20 and 25 hours per week. Its final opening, for a digital marketing and content creation manager, is listed at between $58,500 and $70,000 annually.
Sony, meanwhile, has more than 40 openings in its New York locations across all its operations, though not all positions appear to have salary ranges listed; most appear to ask the applicants for a desired salary target, as part of a standard-issue form through LinkedIn. (The law allows companies 30 days to comply after a complaint is registered before facing penalties. A rep for Sony tells Billboard the company will be complying.) It does list starting salaries for its fellowship program, a 24-month position with a starting salary of $70,000 per year.
Universal Music Group has some 16 openings across various divisions in New York, many at its merchandising division Bravado. Though each posting promises a “competitive compensation package including salary, benefits and generous 401k savings plan with company matching,” none lists a salary range. (A rep for UMG did not respond to a request for comment.)
In the independent sector, several New York-based companies have also listed ranges. Concord, for example, has three non-internship positions available in New York: a publishing paralegal ($70K-$80K); a publishing sync manager ($55K-$65K); and a director of business and legal affairs for publishing ($100K-$125K). BMG has two open New York-based positions: an investments/M&A manager ($80K-$90K) and a senior marketing manager ($70K-$80K). Roc Nation has two music-related New York-based openings: one for a senior director of event sponsorships ($135K-$180K) and one for a senior director of music partnerships ($135K-$170K). A senior coordinator position overseeing royalties and income tracking at Kobalt pays between $45,600 and $57,000 in New York City.
Businesses with three or fewer employees and temp agencies are not subject to the new requirement.
A songwriter who sued Mariah Carey over accusations that she stole her “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his earlier song has dropped his lawsuit — for now.
Mississippi artist Vince Vance filed his copyright lawsuit this summer, claiming Carey’s 1994 holiday blockbuster infringed his 1989 song of the same name. It was no small accusation: “All I Want” has reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 during each of the past three holiday seasons.
But in a court filing on Tuesday, Vance’s attorneys moved to voluntarily dismiss the case against Carey. The move means the case will be dismissed, but leaves the door open for Vance to refile the case in the future. Attorneys for both Carey and Vance did not return requests for comment.
Vance sued in June, claiming his “All I Want for Christmas is You” was recorded in 1989 and had received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her better-known song under the same name. Calling Carey’s track a “derivative” of his own, he demanded at least $20 million in damages from her, co-writer Walter Afanasieff and Sony Music.
The lawsuit against Carey surprised many when it was filed. Wasn’t it too late for Vance to bring his case? There must be a statute of limitations for suing over asong that’s been in the zeitgeist for nearly three decades, right?
But the surprising answer to that question is no, thanks largely to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2014 on the movie Raging Bull, which overturned long-standing rules that limited how long a copyright owner can wait before taking action in court.
In the music industry, the Raging Bull ruling has sparked a number of lawsuits in recent years over decades-old copyright disputes, like a high-profile case against Led Zeppelin over “Stairway To Heaven.” Another case accused U2 of infringement over 1991’s “The Fly,” while Meat Loaf was hit with another suit over 1993’s “I’d Do Anything For Love.”
But just because someone can bring a lawsuit doesn’t mean they’ll win it — and experts told Billboard this summer that Vance’s allegations over “All I Want for Christmas is You” would still face a difficult road ahead in court.
Though the two songs share an identical name and single lyric, that’s where the similarities pretty much end. And that name is hardly unique: records at the U.S. Copyright Office show many other songs with the name “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” including a number from before either Carey or Vance’s songs were written.
“The only similarity he claims is in the title of the song, not the music or lyrics,” Paul Fakler, a veteran music litigator at the law firm Mayer Brown, told Billboard this summer. “Words and short phrases are not protectable under copyright law, and there are dozens of other songs with that same title.”
Before Vance moved to drop the case this week, very little actual litigation had taken place in the intervening four months and the case was still in the earliest procedural stages. His attorneys did not respond to questions about why they dropped the case or whether they plan to refile it.
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: Major law firms cut ties with Kanye West over his antisemitic comments, Slacker fights with SoundExchange over a huge royalties judgment, Coachella sues a nearby business called “Coachillin,” and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Kanye West Is Running Out of Lawyers
After a string of antisemitic statements earlier this month, Kanye West has lost nearly every aspect of his once-formidable business empire. His representatives at CAA have dropped him, and his signature fashion partnerships with Adidas, The Gap and Balenciaga have all been terminated.You can now add his lawyers to that list.Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, the prestigious Wall Street firm that represented Kanye in his dealings with Gap, confirmed to multiple outlets last week that the firm is not currently representing him and “have made the decision not to work with him in the future.”Greenberg Traurig, a top music firm that’s repping him in both a copyright lawsuit and an employment case, said it was taking steps to withdraw from those cases as fast as ethically possible: “This firm was founded by individuals who faced discrimination and many of us lost ancestors because of that kind of hate and prejudice,” the firm wrote in a statement, referring to Jewish founders Larry Hoffman, Mel Greenberg and Robert Traurig.Robert Cohen of Cohen Clair Lans Greifer Thorpe & Rottenstreich, the rapper’s sixth divorce attorney in his split with Kim Kardashian who he only just hired in September, has also dropped him, according to a report from Reuters. And Brown Rudnick partner Camille Vasquez, who rose to prominence representing Johnny Depp in his defamation case against Amber Heard, quit just days after being hired by the embattled rapper, as first reported by the New York Post.It seems even prospective lawyers are distancing themselves. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Alex Spiro, a Billboard Top Music Lawyer who reps Jay-Z and Elon Musk, told Reuters that Ye “asked me to be his attorney but the representation never formalized.” Spiro made it clear: “I do not represent Mr. West.”A lack of options for legal representation isn’t a great situation for West, because he has no shortage of legal problems.Even if he avoids any court battles over his various corporate breakups — and that’s far from certain, given the messy web of intellectual property he splits with Adidas and other former partners — he’s still got plenty of litigation ahead, including looming December deadlines in the divorce case; multiple copyright lawsuits over claims of illegal sampling; a case claiming he stiffed a production company that worked on his Sunday Service; a lawsuit claiming he refused to return clothes to a high-end fashion rental service; a case claiming he owes $4.5 million to a celebrity accountant he abruptly fired; and threats of lawsuits from the family of George Floyd over his incendiary statements about Floyd’s killing.
Other top stories this week…
SLACKER’S ROYALTY WOES – Slacker warned a judge that a recent ruling, requiring the streamer to hand over nearly $10 million in unpaid royalties to SoundExchange, would cause “economic damage” for the company that would be “unsustainable.” But SoundExchange quickly fired back that it had spent years “indulging” such excuses and that labels and artists had waited “long enough” to get paid by the streamer: “The court should deny defendants’ latest attempt to shirk their obligations with the promise that next time will be different.”COACHELLA v. ‘COACHILLIN’ – AEG’s Goldenvoice, the owner of Coachella, filed a trademark infringement lawsuit over a planned “Coachillin” business park located just a few miles north of the festival grounds at the Empire Polo Club. The suit said the 160-acre development plan, aimed at cannabis businesses, isn’t a problem — but needs to pick a new name: “The public has come to associate the phrase ‘Coachillin’ to refer to the Coachella Festival and plaintiffs, not merely to refer to the Coachella Valley — and certainly not Coachillin Holdings.” The case is the latest in a string of trademark cases from Goldenvoice, which sued Ticketmaster last year over a New Year’s Eve concert called “Coachella Day One 22″ and sued a West African company last month over an event called “Afrochella.”COMEDY CARTEL? JUDGE SAYS NO – A federal judge rejected one of Pandora’s key arguments in its legal battle with comedians, dismissing claims that a licensing group called Word Collections was operating as an illegal comedy “cartel” that violated federal antitrust laws. The ruling came in sprawling litigation filed by a slew of comics who want Pandora to start paying the equivalent of publishing royalties for spoken-word content. Faced with those allegations, the streamer responded by arguing that Word Collections and the comedians were effectively trying to create a “monopolistic portfolio” of comedy rights, aimed at “dramatically increasing” the prices streamers must pay. But in the ruling this week, the judge didn’t buy it — saying Pandora didn’t properly allege that the comics had conspired to fix prices, nor that their grouping amounted to an illegal monopoly in the comedy world.BAIL REVOKED FOR TORY LANEZ – A Los Angeles judge ordered Tory Lanezto be placed under house arrest ahead of a trial over accusations that he shot Megan Thee Stallion, citing an incident last month in which the singer allegedly assaulted singer August Alsina in Chicago. The singer is facing more than 22 years in prison over the alleged July 2020 altercation with Stallion, in which he allegedly shot her in the foot during an argument following a party in the Hollywood Hills. The trial is set to kick off at the end of November and the singer had been out on bail, but in September Alsina claimed that Lanez and his entourage attacked him following a Chicago concert. Prosecutors at the time said they were investigating those claims, and Judge David Herriford cited the accusations to revoke Lanez’ bail this week.
A celebrity accountant is suing Kanye West for $4.5 million in allegedly unpaid fees, claiming the embattled artist and entrepreneur abruptly fired him just weeks after hiring him and told him he was “insane” if he thought he would stick to their agreement.
In a lawsuit filed Oct. 21, Thomas St. John claims he was hired in May by Yeezy LLC to serve as its chief financial officer for an 18-month contract with a $300,000 per month fee. He says he demanded those guarantees because of the “risks” of working with West and to assure the star “would not simply walk away.”
But St. John claims that West then did exactly that. At a June meeting at the pricey Malibu restaurant Nobu Ryokan, the accountant claims West “became heated and aggressive” and then abruptly terminated his new CFO.
“He screamed at Mr. St. John and made clear he no longer wanted to work with Plaintiff,” St. John’s lawyers wrote. “When confronted by the 18-month commitment that had just been made, Mr. West stated words to the effect of ‘the 18 month term was bullsh–’ and ‘you’re insane for even thinking I would stick to it.’”
If the new lawsuit is any indication, it looks like St. John plans to stick to it. He says West has made just three of the 18 payments he owes — and is demanding that a court order him to pay the $4.5 million owed on the deal.
Even though it involves millions of dollars, St. John’s new lawsuit might barely even register on the list of problems currently facing the once-beloved rapper.
After a string of antisemitic statements earlier this month, West has lost nearly every aspect of his once-formidable business empire. His representatives at CAA have dropped him, and his signature fashion partnerships with Adidas, The Gap and Balenciaga have all been terminated. It’s hard to know if he’ll even have lawyers to rep him in the current case, since many of his attorneys have begun to cut ties as well.
Even before the current whirlwind, West was already being accused of stiffing business partners. In early July, the high-end fashion rental service David Casavant Archive said West never returned more than a dozen “esteemed” items and owed $400,000 in late fees. A few weeks later, the production company Phantom Labs said the star owed $7.1 million for work done on his cancelled Coachella and other events.
A spokesperson for West could not be located to comment on the new lawsuit. Multiple former press representatives for West have recently told Billboard that they no longer work with him.
A federal judge has rejected one of Pandora’s key arguments in its legal battle with comedians, dismissing claims that a licensing group called Word Collections was operating as an illegal comedy “cartel.”
Months after a slew of comedians (including the estates of George Carlin and Robin Williams) sued Pandora to seek more royalties for spoken-word content, the streamer fired back in May with allegations that the comics had violated federal antitrust laws by doing so.
Pandora claimed that by teaming up with Word Collections to demand such royalties, the comedians were effectively trying to create a “monopolistic portfolio” of comedy rights, aimed at “dramatically increasing” the prices streamers must pay for comedy.
But in a ruling on Wednesday, Judge Mark C. Scarsi dismissed those claims. He said Pandora had not properly alleged that Word Collections and the comedians had conspired to fix prices, nor that they amounted to an illegal monopoly in the comedy world.
“Pandora’s description of Word Collections’ impressive but short list of comedians whose works it licenses does not suffice to demonstrate that Word Collections owns a dominant share of the comedy recording market in the United States,” the judge wrote.
The ruling is a blow for Pandora, though not a fatal one. The judge left open the possibility that the streamer could re-raise the issue, and the company can still pivot to other defenses, like the more fundamental argument that comics are simply not legally entitled to the added royalties they’re seeking.
A rep for Pandora declined comment.
Judge Scarsi’s decision came amid a long and tricky fight over how and when streamers like Pandora must pay for the comedy recordings that appear on their services – a more unsettled legal question than one might think.
Every piece of music is covered by two copyrights – one for the sound recording itself and another for the underlying work that’s been recorded. Streaming services like Pandora pay for both when it comes to songs, but for comedy records, they’ve typically only ever paid for the recordings.
Part of the problem is that there is no society like ASCAP or BMI to collect such royalties for spoken works. Over the past 18 months, two groups – Word Collections and Spoken Giants – have moved to fill that void and have begun asking streaming services to pay those fees for comedy; those efforts are what prompted Spotify to pull down some comedy content last fall.
And since February, a number of comedians have taken the issue to court, accusing Pandora of willfully refusing to pay for content: “Pandora did what most goliaths do: it decided it would infringe now to ensure it had this very valuable intellectual property on its platform to remain competitive, and deal with the consequences later. Later is now.”
Pandora has sharply refuted the allegations, arguing it has “always satisfied its copyright obligations” by paying “millions of dollars in license fees every year” for comedy recordings. It says that comedy records are less akin to music and more like movies, for which streamers like Netflix typically pay only a single, all-encompassing license, regardless of the various elements that are used in the film.
If Pandora’s antitrust counterclaims remain dismissed, those core arguments about copyrights and licenses could now take center stage in the case.
Richard Busch, a prominent music litigator who is representing the comedians, told Billboard on Thursday that he and his clients are “obviously very happy with the decision.”
“We always believed the antitrust counterclaim Pandora brought was ludicrous and a transparent attempt to intimidate these legendary comedians,” Busch said. “The court could not have been clearer in its ruling. We now hope to be able to focus on and litigate the serious copyright infringement claims that are at the heart of this litigation.”
Britney Spears‘ father and his lawyers should be sanctioned and found in contempt of court for disclosing confidential medical information on his daughter that was under seal, the pop star’s lawyer said Wednesday (Oct. 26) at a hearing that ended with no decision on the issue.
“They’re trying to embarrass Britney Spears and bully Britney Spears, while trying to vindicate Jamie Spears,” said attorney Mathew Rosengart.
The sealed exhibits were included in a motion from Jamie Spears filed in July to compel the deposition of his daughter, which was denied. After the filing was submitted, Rosengart was forced to move to seal the motion to compel. Alex Weingarten, representing Jamie Spears, challenged the sealing.
“Why did he oppose the sealing motion?” Rosengart asked. He urged L.A. Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny to find Weingarten in contempt of court and to issue sanctions against him and Jamie Spears.
“None of this has anything to do with the matters before the court,” responded Weingarten. He said he’ll “refrain from commenting” on Rosengart’s “unnecessary speech.”
Penny agreed to seal the motion. She found that some of the exhibits in the filing were “already ordered sealed and are confidential,” explaining that it was “highly inappropriate for Jamie Spears to proffer these documents.”
In September, Jamie Spears moved for a state appeals court to overturn Penny’s ruling barring him from deposing his daughter over claims that he abused and surveilled her. Weingarten didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
During the hearing, the judge also denied a motion from Lynne Spears for her daughter to cover her $663,203 legal bill. In her motion for fees, she stressed that her daughter was subjected to treatment she “did not believe was warranted.” Spears opposed covering the bill because her mother was never a fiduciary.
The order denying fees was issued as Rosengart continues to probe management firm Tri Star’s involvement in establishing the conservatorship and the firm’s alleged surveillance of Spears. In a discovery order issued on Oct. 10, Penny granted parts of Tri Star’s motion to quash Spears’ subpoena while refusing its effort to get out of providing records and communications relating to allegations made by a former Spears security staffer in The New York Times documentary, Controlling Britney Spears, of electronic surveillance, cloning or monitoring of the pop star’s phone. She found that requests to depose Tri Star executives and produce documents on the issue are “relevant and discoverable.”
Tri Star executive Robin Greenhill, accused of helping Spears’ father spy on her private messages, denied any knowledge of surveillance in a declaration to the court and maintained that no one at the firm “ever suggested monitoring Ms. Spears’ electronic communications.” Lawyers for the firm called requests for information dating back 14 years “grossly overbroad,” stressing that Tri Star was not involved at the outset of the conservatorship.
In the same order, Penny limited the scope of discovery and depositions to the accounting period in 2019, which details money in and out of the estate that year. She also found that requests for information about the establishment of the conservatorship are off limits.
“Evidence of extrinsic fraud is not currently present,” reads the order from Penny, who concluded that “the scope of discovery in the present proceeding must necessarily relate to the pending petitions and filed objections to the petitions.”
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Tri Star attorney Scott Edelman called the ruling a “complete victory” for his client.
“As we have said all along, and the Court correctly held in its ruling, there is no fraud in connection with any of the prior accountings filed as part of Ms. Spears’ conservatorship,” he said. “The Court also correctly held that there was no evidence of any fiduciary relationship between Tri Star, as business manager, and Ms. Spears, as conservatee.”
According to court documents, Jamie Spears owed at least $40,000 to Tri Star for a loan it gave him. Rosengart has stressed the conflict of interest when Jamie Spears hired the firm to manage the conservatorship. Tri Star has been paid more than $18 million from Spears’ estate.
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
A Los Angeles judge on Wednesday ordered Tory Lanez be placed under house arrest ahead of a trial over accusations that he shot Megan Thee Stallion, citing an incident last month in which the singer allegedly assaulted singer August Alsina in Chicago.
Lanez (real name Daystar Peterson) had been out on bail over the alleged shooting, but last month Alsina claimed that Lanez and his entourage attacked him following a Chicago concert. At the time, prosecutors in the Stallion case said they were “aware” of Alsina’s claims and were investigating them.
At a hearing in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, Judge David Herriford cited those accusations to revoke bail, ordering Lanez to be placed under house arrest until Nov. 28, when the trial is scheduled to begin. If convicted, he faces more than 22 years in prison.
A rep for Lanez did not immediately return a request for comment from Billboard.
Lanez was charged in October 2020 with one count of assault with a firearm and another gun possession charge over the July 2020 incident, in which he allegedly shot Stallion in the foot during an argument after a pool party in the Hollywood Hills.
Stallion had initially told police officers that she cut her foot stepping on broken glass, but days later revealed that she had suffered a gunshot wound. After media outlets reported that Lanez had fired the gun, Megan directly accused him in an August 2020 Instagram video.
Lanez pleaded not guilty in November 2020. At a December 2021 hearing, a Los Angeles judge allowed the case to move forward to a trial. During that hearing, a police detective testified that Stallion had told him that Lanez yelled “Dance, bitch!” as he opened fire around her feet, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Though he’d remained out on bail while awaiting trial, Lanez has repeatedly drawn the ire of the judge overseeing the case.
In August 2021, the rapper’s bail was increased from $190,000 to $250,000 after he made a surprise appearance at the Rolling Loud Miami Festival on July 25 just moments after Stallion departed the stage — effectively violating a protective order that requires him to stay at least 100 yards away from the “Savage” hitmaker. And this past April, a judge increased his bail again to $350,000 after some of the rapper’s social media posts were found to have breached court orders requiring him to avoid any contact with Stallion.
The incident with Alsina was apparently the last straw.
In a Sept. 18 post on Instagram, Alsina shared an image in which he can be seen standing in an elevator with blood coming from his mouth. In the caption, Alsina claimed Lanez physically assaulted him after he refused to shake his hand following a show the previous night.
A video published to Twitter a day later, which purported to document the lead-up and aftermath of the alleged assault, appears to show Alsina rebuffing a handshake from Lanez backstage. In the final half of the video, Lanez seems to be celebrating as a man off-camera can be heard saying Lanez “knocked him out.”
Alsina appears to have filed a police report with the Chicago Police Department, who confirmed to Billboard that they had received a report of a “30-ye[a]r-old male” being “punched in the face by a 30-year-old male after exiting a building in the 2300 block of S. Lake Shore Drive” – the location of a theater where both Lanez and Alsina were billed to perform that night.