Legal
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The estate of the late rapper Juice WRLD is being sued by a music producer named Joshua Jaramillo, who claims he’s owed royalties from the late rapper’s 2021 collab with Suga of BTS.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday (July 31) in Los Angeles court, Jaramillo says he served as a producer on “Girl of My Dreams,” a 2021 hit that debuted at No. 29 on the Hot 100, and that he was promised a 5% ownership stake and an additional 1% producer royalty.
But “despite repeated requests by plaintiff,” Jaramillo says the estate has not paid him everything he’s owed.
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“Plaintiff has performed all services under the contract. ‘Girl of My Dreams’ became a nationwide hit,” Jaramillo’s lawyers write. “Defendant has failed to pay plaintiff the full amount of agreed upon royalties.”
The lawsuit, which is short on details, also claims that the estate has refused to provide a legally-required accounting “to verify that all royalties were paid.”
A rep for the estate could not immediately be reached for comment.
Juice WRLD (Jarad Anthony Higgins), a pioneering voice in emo rap and SoundCloud rap, died of a drug overdose in December 2019 while onboard a private jet flying from Los Angeles to Chicago. Citing law enforcement sources, TMZ reported days later that the rapper swallowed a large number of pills to hide them from federal agents who were waiting for the plane to land.
Released as a promotional single for his posthumous 2021 album, Fighting Demons, “Girl of My Dreams” was a collaboration with South Korean rapper Suga and features lyrics in both English and Korean. Though the track spent just a week on the Billboard Hot 100, Fighting Demons was a bigger hit, spending 72 weeks on the Billboard 200 and peaking at No. 2.
The new case is the second time Juice’s estate has been sued over the past year. In October, an artist named PD Beats filed his own lawsuit claiming he’d served as one of the co-writers of the rapper’s 2021 track “Not Enough” but had not been paid his proper royalties.
That case, which also named “Not Enough” producer Dr. Luke (Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald) as a defendant, remains pending.
Trigger warning: the following story contains descriptions of violence against children.
British authorities have charged an unnamed 17-year-old with murder in the mass stabbing rampage at a Taylor Swift-themed danced class in Southport, England on Monday that left three young girls dead and eight other children and two adults injured.
According to BBC News, the teenager — who cannot be named because of his age — was slated to make an initial appearance in Liverpool City Magistrates’ Court on Thursday (August 1) after also being charged with 10 counts of attempted murder and possession of a bladed article. Authorities named the three young girls killed in the incident: Bebe King, 6; Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7; and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, 9 and announced that seven of those injured in the attack are still believed to be in critical condition.
Swift, in the midst of a European run of shows on her Eras Tour, reacted in shock to the attack, posting a note on her Instagram Story on Tuesday morning in which she said, “The horror of yesterday’s attack in Southport is washing over me continuously, and I’m just completely in shock… The loss of life and innocence, and the horrendous trauma inflicted on everyone who was there, the families and first responders. These were just little kids at a dance class. I am at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.”
Police have said that the 17-year-old suspect from Cardiff was arrested at the community center hosting the dance class and that a knife was seized following the attack in the seaside town in Northwest England near Liverpool. Witnesses described a terrifying scene in which bloodied children ran in terror from the center where the Swift-themed dance and yoga event for children 6-11 was taking place with the promise of “a morning of Taylor Swift-themed yoga, dance and bracelet making.”
According to BBC, when officers arrived on the scene Monday morning they found multiple people, many of them children, suffering from serious injuries following the “ferocious” attack. Police said a person armed with a knife walked into the building and attacked those inside, with two adults suffering critical injuries while bravely trying to protect the children from the alleged assailant.
On Tuesday, far-right protesters fueled by angry and false internet rumors threw bottles and stones at police, wounding 20 officers outside a Northwest England mosque near the spot where the three girls were killed. Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned what he called “thuggery” and said the angry crowd hijacked what had been a peaceful vigil attended by hundreds in the center of Southport to mourn the dead and seriously wounded.
The violent crowd authorities believe had ties to the far-right group English Defence League, torched a police van and several cars following rumors about the identity of the teenage suspect. The rampage came after an emotional crowd gathered earlier in the evening in Southport outside The Atkinson theater and museum in to hold a minute of silence for the victims.
Mass casualty shootings and killings with firearms are exceptionally rare in Britain following a mass shooting at a primary school in Scotland in 1996 that killed 16 students and a teacher. Following that event, Parliament banned private ownership of most handguns and semi-automatic weapons and since then there have been no school shootings in the U.K., though attacks with blades remain a serious issue.
At press time Swift fans had set up a Swifties for Southport fundraiser for the families of victims that had raised more than $433,000 so far.
AI music firms Suno and Udio are firing back with their first responses to sweeping lawsuits filed by the major record labels, arguing that they were free to use copyrighted songs to train their models and claiming the music industry is abusing intellectual property to crush competition.
In legal filings on Thursday, the two firms admitted to using proprietary materials to create their artificial intelligence, with Suno saying it was “no secret” that the company had ingested “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet.”
But both companies said that such use was clearly lawful under copyright’s fair use doctrine, which allows for the reuse of existing materials to create new works.
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“What Udio has done — use existing sound recordings as data to mine and analyze for the purpose of identifying patterns in the sounds of various musical styles, all to enable people to make their own new creations — is a quintessential ‘fair use,’” Udio wrote in its filing. “Plaintiffs’ contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values.”
The filings, lodged by the same law firm (Latham & Watkins) that reps both companies, go beyond the normal “answer” to a lawsuit — typically a sparse document that simply denies each claim. Instead, Suno and Udio went on offense, with extended introductions that attempt to frame the narrative of a looming legal battle that could take years to resolve.
In doing so, they took square aim at the major labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) that filed the case in June — a group that they said “dominates the music industry” and is now abusing copyright law to maintain that power.
“What the major record labels really don’t want is competition,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Where Suno sees musicians, teachers and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share.”
Suno and Udio have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of AI-generated music. Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit with “BBL Drizzy,” a parody track popularized with a remix by super-producer Metro Boomin and later sampled by Drake himself. And as of May, Suno had raised a total of $125 million in funding to create what Rolling Stone called a “ChatGPT for music.”
In June, the major labels sued both companies, claiming they had infringed copyrighted music on an “unimaginable scale” to train their models. The lawsuits accused the two firms of “trampling the rights of copyright owners” as part of a “mad dash to become the dominant AI music generation service.”
The case followed similar lawsuits filed by book authors, visual artists, newspaper publishers and other creative industries, which collectively pose what could be a trillion-dollar legal question: Is it infringement to use vast troves of proprietary works to build an AI model that spits out new creations? Or is it just a form of legal fair use, transforming all those old works into something entirely new?
In Thursday’s response, Suno and Udio argued unequivocally that it was the latter. They likened their machines to a “human musician” who had played earlier songs to learn the “building blocks of music” — and then used what they had learned to create entirely new works in existing styles.
“Those genres and styles — the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music — are not something that anyone owns,” Suno wrote in its filing. “Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song.”
The lawsuit from the labels, Suno and Udio say, are thus an abuse of copyright law, aimed at claiming improper ownership over “entire genres of music.” They called the litigation an “attempt to misuse IP rights to shield incumbents from competition and reduce the universe of people who are equipped to create new expression.”
Both filings hint at how Suno and Udio will make their fair use arguments. The two companies say the cases will not really turn on the “inputs” — the millions of songs used to train the models — but rather on the “outputs,” or the new songs that are created. While the labels are claiming that the inputs were illegally copied, the AI firms say the music companies “explicitly disavow” that any output was a copycat.
“That concession will ultimately prove fatal to plaintiffs’ claims,” Suno wrote in its filing. “It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process,invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product.”
A spokeswoman and an attorney for the labels did not immediately return a request for comment.
R. Kelly is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn his convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, arguing the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
In a petition filed with the high court on Monday (July 29), attorneys for the disgraced R&B singer asked the justices to take up his case and toss out an April ruling by a lower appeals court, which said that “no statute of limitations saves him” from his 2022 convictions.
Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, argued that an updated federal law extending the statute of limitations, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Like all appeals to the Supreme Court, Kelly’s case faces long odds. The high court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
This week’s petition deals with only one of Kelly’s two sets of felony sex abuse convictions. The other one — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is currently pending on appeal before a lower appellate court.
In the current case, a different team of federal prosecutors from Chicago accused Kelly of violating child pornography laws, enticing minors for sex and obstructing justice by upending a 2008 criminal trial. Though he was acquitted on certain counts, Kelly was convicted in September 2022 and later sentenced to 20 years in prison; the vast majority of that sentence will be served concurrently with the New York sentence.
Bonjean, who famously won a 2021 ruling at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturning Bill Cosby‘s 2018 sex assault conviction, has repeatedly argued that Kelly is innocent and that she will take his cases all the way to the Supreme Court.
In doing so on Monday, she focused on the PROTECT Act — a 2003 federal statute aimed at preventing child abuse. Among other changes, the 2003 law eliminated the statutes of limitations for child sex abuse victims, extending the right to sue through the entire life of the victim.
But Bonjean said the PROTECT Act was not written to apply retroactively to crimes allegedly committed before it was passed. Without a clear intention from Congress to apply it to past crimes, she wrote, a law must be considered to only apply to future wrongdoing.
“This court has explained that the aversion to retroactive rulemaking is deeply rooted in our jurisprudence and embodies a legal doctrine centuries older than our Republic,” she wrote. “Elementary considerations of fairness dictate that individuals should have an opportunity to know what the law is and to conform their conduct.”
StubHub is facing a lawsuit from Washington DC’s attorney general over allegations that the ticket resale platform foists “convoluted junk fees” on concertgoers after luring them in with “deceptively low prices.”
In a complaint filed Wednesday, Attorney General Brian Schwalb accuses StubHub of violating the District’s consumer protection laws by using the “drip pricing” — an “exploitative pricing scheme” in which a company requires consumers to pay fees that weren’t advertised in the initial price.
“For years, StubHub has illegally deceived District consumers through its convoluted junk fee scheme,” Schwalb said in a statement announcing the case. “StubHub lures consumers in by advertising a deceptively low price, forces them through a burdensome purchase process, and then finally reveals a total on the checkout page that is vastly higher than the originally advertised ticket price.”
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The “hidden” fees imposed by StubHub total “upwards of 40% of the advertised ticket price,” the lawsuit claims, and DC consumers have allegedly paid $118 million in such fees since 2015.
In a statement, StubHub said the company was “committed to creating a transparent, secure and competitive marketplace” for its customers. “We are disappointed that the DC Attorney General is targeting StubHub when our user experience is consistent with the law, our competitors’ practices and the broader e-commerce sector. We strongly support federal and state solutions that enhance existing laws to empower consumers, such as requiring all-in pricing uniformly across platforms.”
Consumers have complained for years about “convenience” and “service” fees that are tacked onto the price of tickets for concerts and other live events. Laws requiring “all-in pricing” — the full, final cost, presented at the beginning of a sale — have been enacted by New York, California and other states in recent years. A federal bill (Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET, Act) was passed by the House of Representatives in May and is awaiting a vote in the Senate.
Hidden fees are also a key accusation in the pending antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation filed by the Department of Justice earlier this year. In that case, the DOJ has argued that such fees levied by Ticketmaster on American concertgoers “far exceed” those in other countries.
“Any fan who has logged onto Ticketmaster’s website to buy a concert ticket knows the feeling of shock and frustration as the base cost of the ticket increases dramatically with the addition of fees,” the DOJ wrote in its complaint against Live Nation. “Whatever the name of the fee and however the fees are packaged and collected, they are essentially a ‘Ticketmaster Tax’ that ultimately raise the price fans pay.”
In Wednesday’s lawsuit, Schwalb argues that StubHub imposes those same fees on its customers. Calling it a “a classic bait-and-switch scheme,” the lawsuit claims the final price of a StubHub ticket is only revealed after customers have “invested time and effort clicking through an intentionally long, multi-page purchase process” — which features a countdown clock to “create a false sense of urgency.”
“StubHub designed this unfair and deceptive scheme to make more money,” Schwalb wrote. “By forcing consumers to click through over a dozen pages before they see the real price, StubHub puts consumers in the position of having to choose between either paying those unexpected fees or abandoning the time and effort they have expended.”
In addition to springing such fees at the end of a transaction, the lawsuit also accuses StubHub of choosing deceptive names for them — a claim that echoes longstanding complaints about what vaguely-named ticketing fees imposed by many companies actually cover.
“What StubHub identifies as ‘Fulfillment and Service Fees’ are in fact influenced by factors unrelated to ‘fulfillment’ or ‘service,’” the lawsuit reads. “Furthermore, the fees vary wildly, and StubHub never discloses to the consumer how those fees are calculated or what services these fees fund.”
Read the entire lawsuit against StubHub here:
The new judge in Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial has denied the rapper’s renewed request to be released from jail until a verdict is reached.
Two weeks after Judge Paige Reese Whitaker became the third judge to preside over the huge racketeering case, she rejected arguments from Thug’s attorney Brian Steel to release the rapper on bond and allow him to live under house arrest with strict monitoring.
Steel had argued that the recent turbulent events in the case — Judge Ural Glanville was ordered removed from the case over a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness — were the kind of “changed circumstances” that would allow her to overturn earlier rulings that kept him locked up.
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But at a hearing Tuesday, Whitaker was unswayed. “I don’t know how I would have decided the bond originally,” the judge said. “That’s not before me. These are not the kind of changed circumstances [required under precedent], so I’m not going to reconsider the bond.”
Thug — real name Jeffery Williams — and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that their YSL was not really a record label called Young Stoner Life but rather a violent Atlanta gang called Young Slime Life. Citing Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, prosecutors claim the group operated a criminal enterprise that committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
The trial kicked off in January 2023 but has faced repeated delays and disruptions, including an unprecedented 10-month jury selection, the stabbing of another defendant and now the removal of the presiding judge. Prosecutors have only presented part of their vast list of potential witnesses, and the case is expected to run well into 2025.
Thug has been sitting in jail for more than two years while the slow-moving trial has dragged on, repeatedly denied bond by Glanville over concerns that he might intimidate witnesses. But with Glanville gone, Steel argued last week that Thug should not be “languishing in the county jail” under “tortuous” conditions when he has not be convicted of a crime.
At Tuesday’s hearing, he reiterated those pleas to Whitaker. “Mr. Williams has been in custody since the 9th day of May, 2022,” Steel said. “He has sat through unnecessary jury selection for months, bringing in over 2,000 people when the jurors were chosen from the first 511. That should not be on him. That is excess. He has now sat here for a month while the antics of Judge Glanville and [prosecutors] caused him to wander in squalor in a jail.”
Though Whitaker denied Thug’s renewed request for bond, the new judge suggested during the hearing that she would speed up the pace of the case, ordering prosecutors to better organize their planned witness testimony and evidence, saying, “It should not take another seven months.”
The judge is also still considering whether case should continue at all. Thug and three of the other YSL defendants have moved for a mistrial, citing Glanville’s conduct and other issues with the case.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Whitaker denied two of those motions, including one that had argued that a brand new judge could not possibly “make informed rulings” after missing the first 19 months of a trial in which over 100 witnesses had already testified. But she left two pending, including Steel’s accusations that Glanville’s behavior had irreparably broken the case.
“If that is the case, there will be a different ruling made that will impact this trial, that may result in a mistrial, that may result in a mistrial with prejudice,” the judge said.
The 1975 and frontman Matty Healy are facing a lawsuit from the organizers of Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival, according to a report by Variety, filed over accusations that Healy’s on-stage protest of the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws resulted in the festival being shut down.
In a case filed in the UK’s High Court, Future Sound Asia is demanding $2.4 million over the July 2023 incident in Kuala Lumpur, during which Healy gave a profanity-laden speech criticizing Malaysia’s anti-LGBTQ laws and then kissed bandmate Ross MacDonald.
Following the incident, local authorities revoked the festival’s license and canceled the final two nights of shows. As reported by Billboard last year, sources within Future Sound said that the incident left the festival in financial ruin and could limit future concerts in Malaysia for years.
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In its lawsuit, Future Sound claims that Healy and The 1975 breached their contract with the festival, which stipulated that they would abide by local guidelines. Those rules included kissing, swearing, smoking and drinking on stage, taking off clothes, and talking about politics or religion.
The case claims that local authorities initially refused to let The 1975 play at all, citing Healy’s drug problems. But Future Sound claims that the band appealed and promised that Healy would adhere to “all local guidelines and regulations” in order to secure approval.
A rep for the band did not immediately return a request for comment on the accusations.
Healy’s kiss and statements — he said, among other things, that it was “f—ing ridiculous to tell people what they can do with that and that” — were meant as a protest against Malaysia’s strict anti-LGBTQ+ laws, which make homosexuality a crime.
But local activists have since criticized him, calling it a “publicity stunt” by a Western rock star with a “white savior complex.” He also took light criticism from Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, who had been scheduled to play before the festival was canceled, who said that people “should be knowledgable and respectful toward the culture you’re not familiar with.”
Healy addressed those critiques in October, saying he was “pissed off” about the “liberal outrage against our band for remaining consistent with our pro-LGBTQ stage show.”
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Martin Shkreli argues he wasn’t required to turn over personal copies of a rare of Wu-Tang Clan album to prosecutors; a litigious rock photographer sues Warner Records in the latest of more than 50 copyright lawsuits; the new judge in Young Thug’s gang trial faces a flood of new motions; and more.
THE BIG STORY: The Plot Thickens In Wu-Tang Album Case
When Martin Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud and ordered to forfeit his copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to federal prosecutors, was he allowed to retain personal copies? PleasrDAO — a digital art collective that bought the one-of-a-kind album from the government in 2021 —certainly thinks he wasn’t. The group sued Shkreli in federal court last month, accusing him of violating that forfeiture order by retaining copies and then threatening to leak them to the public, a move it says would destroy the value of the rare album. But in a new response last week, Shkreli’s attorneys told a very different story. Everyone knows that when the disgraced “Pharma Bro” bought the only copy of Wu-Tang’s album in 2014, the deal came with bizarre contractual requirements — namely, that he couldn’t release it to the general public until 2103. But Shkreli’s lawyers say the deal did allow him to make personal copies for private use. And when he turned over the physical CD to the government, his lawyers say he wasn’t required to hand over those private copies: “Defendant continues to have the right to use them to this day.” A month into the lawsuit, two dueling visions are coming into view. Pleasr is leaning on the forfeiture order, citing a passage that banned Shkreli from taking any action that would “affect the availability, marketability or value” of the album. Defense lawyers, on the other hand, point to the government’s sale to Pleasr, arguing that the feds made no assurances that the original CD was the only copy of Shaolin in existence. “Plaintiff was well aware that its purchase of assets from did not include any promise or expectation of ‘exclusivity’ or ‘uniqueness,’” Shkreli’s lawyers wrote. “It bought a copy of a musical work that it knew was not unique, and cannot now claim to be irreparably harmed by the existence of its non-uniqueness.” For more, go read our full story on the Shaolin case — and stay tuned for a looming ruling from the judge on whether to impose a preliminary injunction against Shkreli.
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Other top stories this week…
LEGAL EXPOSURE? – Neil Zlozower, a veteran rock photographer who’s snapped images of Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and many other bands, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Warner Records, accusing the label of using his photo of Tom Petty in a Facebook post without permission. It turns out the case is hardly the first for Zlozower, who has filed a whopping 57 copyright lawsuits since 2016, targeting Universal Music Group, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Mötley Crüe and many others over alleged unauthorized use of his images.CONCERT MELEE – Chris Brown and Live Nation were sued again over an alleged melee that took place backstage at a concert in Fort Worth last week, this time by a security guard who says he was “brutally and severely” beaten when he tried to break up the fight. The lawsuit, which cites Brown’s high-profile 2009 attack on his then-girlfriend Rihanna that led to a felony conviction, comes after the alleged victims themselves filed their own separate case.YSL CASE UPDATE – The new judge in Young Thug’s sprawling Atlanta gang trial, Judge Paige Reese Whitaker, has been greeted by a flood of new motions, including a renewed demand to release the rapper from the “torturous conditions” he’s faced while sitting in jail for more than two years. Judge Ural Glanville, who was removed from the case earlier this month after revelations of a secret meeting with prosecutors and a key witness, had repeatedly denied such requests. SHOOTING ARRESTS – Three men were arrested in Jacksonville in connection with the deadly shooting of rapper Julio Foolio last month. Sean Gathright, 18, Alicia Andrews, 21, and Isaiah Chance Jr., 21, were each charged with premeditated first degree murder with a firearm, among other charges, over the June 23 killing.
Live Nation’s top two in-house attorneys will not be allowed to access “highly confidential” documents produced by competitors like AEG Presents and SeatGeek in the antitrust lawsuit filed against the touring giant by the Department of Justice, though it will be granted access to less sensitive “confidential” documents under strict conditions limiting how the information is used and shared, according to a protective court order signed Monday (July 29) in the Southern District of New York.
A federal judge overseeing the case agreed to establish the two-tiered system for dealing with non-public documents the DOJ subpoenaed from Live Nation competitors as part of its ongoing investigation. For the last six weeks, DOJ antitrust lead trial counsel Bonny Sweeney has been in talks with Live Nation, which is accused of operating its ticketing and concert promotion businesses as a monopoly, about restricting access for the company’s in-house lawyers — executive vp of corporate and regulatory affairs Dan Wall and senior vp of litigation Kimberly Tobias — to confidential information handed over by competitors. Attorneys for Live Nation have argued that granting Wall and Tobias access to confidential information is vital in helping the company prepare its defense.
“Mr. Wall and Ms. Tobias are litigation counsel in good standing and officers of the court,” Live Nation outside counsel Alfred C. Pfeiffer wrote in a letter to New York federal judge Arun Subramanian. “Both have been bound by numerous protective orders and never been accused of violating those orders. Their access to confidential information in no way puts such information at risk.”
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Government lawyers counter that even if Wall and Tobias “pledge not to use any information they receive other than for this case, they can’t unsee what they have seen,” Subramanian wrote in a July 23 court order trying to resolve the confidentiality access question. Two days after that, attorneys for SeatGeek, AEG and ASM Global filed letters asking Subramanian to prevent Wall and Tobias from viewing any sensitive documents produced by the companies.
The files SeatGeek produced for the government “include documents that a company would never want to fall into the hands of any competitor,” SeatGeek attorney William Kalema wrote to the court.
“SeatGeek hears on at least a weekly basis from venues that are reluctant even to meet with SeatGeek for fear of retaliation from Defendants,” the letter continued. “If the market were to learn that venues’ contracts and other communications with Ticketmaster’s competitors were made available to Defendants’ senior management, SeatGeek’s ability to market its product would be hindered even further.”
Attorneys for AEG said they had produced “hundreds of thousands of documents” for the DOJ, including the company’s “most sensitive and competitively significant materials.” AEG attorney Justin Bernick took particular issue with Wall over past statements Wall has made in the media and on Live Nation’s blog, arguing that Wall has often acted as the company’s spokesperson rather than its lawyer.
After a brief hearing, Subramanian ruled that Wall and Tobias would not be allowed to view documents marked as highly confidential — meaning those involving trade secrets, customer lists, current or future financial and strategic information, private contract terms, personnel files, planning documents, and anything deemed sensitive by the courts — and that those documents can only be viewed by Live Nation’s outside attorneys. Wall and Tobias can, however, view confidential information — defined as previously non-public financial information, material related to ownership of non-public companies, business plans and marketing campaign documents related to product development.
In order to view confidential court files, Wall and Tobias must agree not to participate or advise Live Nation on “competitive decision-making” or litigation against AEG or SeatGeek — except for litigation tied to the DOJ lawsuit — for two years after the final confidential documents are reviewed.
The “highly confidential” and “confidential” designations will be determined by those producing the documents, Subramanian wrote in the earlier July 23 opinion, noting that “if it turns out that vast swaths of the record are improperly designated highly confidential, the Court will step in” and require “a page-by-page review of documents by the producing party on a tight timeframe or appropriate modifications to the protective order.”
Billboard has reached out to Live Nation for comment on this story. The trial for USA v. Live Nation Entertainment is scheduled to begin March 2, 2026.
The Tampa Police Department announced the arrest of three people on Monday (July 29) in connection with deadly shooting of rapper Julio Foolio last month. According to WFLA, three individuals — Sean Gathright, 18, Alicia Andrews, 21, and Isaiah Chance Jr., 21 — were arrested in Jacksonville and charged with premeditated first degree murder and […]