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A rapper popular on TikTok must pay Sony Music more than $800,000 in damages for using a copyrighted sample without permission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday (March 27), saying that the big fine would teach him a six-figure “lesson” about “carefully selecting the materials included in his raps.”
Sony sued Trefuego (real name Dantreal Daevon Clark-Rainbolt) in 2021, accusing him of using a “blatant” sample from a 1986 Japanese instrumental song in his “90mh” — a track that Sony claimed had been featured in 155,000 TikTok videos and streamed 100 million times on Spotify.
After struggling to locate him, a federal judge ruled last year that the 20-year-old rapper had, in fact, infringed Sony’s copyrights. And in a follow-up ruling Wednesday, that same judge ordered him to hand over a whopping $802,997 — covering roughly $700,000 he earned in profits from Spotify and other platforms, and approximately $100,000 he would pay Sony in licensing fees.
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“The court hopes this case will serve as a $802,997.23 lesson for defendant in carefully selecting the materials included in his raps,” U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman wrote in his decision.
The judge also ordered Trefuego to pay ongoing royalties, including a 50% cut of publishing revenue and a 20% cut of recording revenue, and to repay $2,230 in legal costs incurred by Sony.
“Sony pursued a reasonable, non-frivolous claim to vindicate infringement of its copyrighted work,” Judge Pittman wrote. “Some may query the wisdom of pursuing a claim against a relatively small fish like Trefuego, but that fact does not render Sony’s motivation improper or their lawsuit unreasonable.”
Sony has been chasing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that it believed “90mh” was built on an illegal sample of “Reflections,” a 1986 song by Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched its lawsuit that December.
In its complaint, the label pointed out that Hinata’s song had seen a recent surge of popularity after an appearance in Netflix’s 2020 film Tigertail and placement on popular ambient music playlists on Spotify.
“Trefuego brazenly sought to ride the coattails of Hinata’s creativity and popularity without regard to the United States copyright laws or the rights of plaintiffs,” the label’s attorneys wrote at the time. “He used and copied plaintiffs’ work without so much as asking, or paying a cent to plaintiffs, and he continued to exploit that music despite plaintiffs’ demand that he stop.”
Sony’s lawsuit took a bizarre detour last year when Judge Pittman ruled that the label could forgo traditional methods of contacting Trefuego and instead simply send him direct messages on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud. In doing so, the judge ruled that Sony had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego in real life, including “seven separate attempts” to serve him and hiring a private investigator.
In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s representatives apparently went “to his mother’s house on Mother’s Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Sadly, he was not there, and his own mother claimed she did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.
With those procedural issues settled, Judge Pittman ruled on the case in November — and sided decisively with Sony. Though the judge noted that the case pitted “one of the largest international entertainment conglomerates on the planet” against “a twenty-year-old kid,” he ruled that the David-and-Goliath posture would not protect Trefuego from liability.
“To quote ’90mh’, this case involves a young man who was ‘too focused on getting dough’ to understand the broader implications of purchasing a creative work without proof of originality or license-to-use,” the judge wrote in his November decision. “To quote ‘90mh’ again, Trefuego likely imagined Sony wouldn’t ‘really want smoke’ enough to prosecute this claim. But they did.”
Neither Trefuego nor a spokeswoman for Sony Music responded to requests for comment.
Attorneys for Madison Square Garden executive James Dolan are firing back at a lawsuit that alleges he pressured a masseuse into unwanted sex while his band was touring with the Eagles, calling his accuser an “opportunist” who is “looking for a quick payday.”
In a motion filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, Dolan’s lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, in which a woman named Kellye Croft claims that Dolan coerced her into “unlawful and unwelcome sex acts” on repeated occasions during the 2013 tour.
Arguing that the allegations were “completely manufactured,” Dolan’s attorneys told the judge that it is “an unfortunate truth that some men, by virtue of their status, have become targets for opportunists looking for a quick payday.”
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“If this case were to proceed … plaintiff would be exposed as such an opportunist, and her claims would be soundly rejected for the lies that they are,” Dolan’s attorney lead counsel E. Danya Perry wrote. “But this action should never reach that stage, as plaintiff’s complaint is entirely deficient.”
Dolan is the majority owner/CEO of Madison Square Garden Entertainment, a live music giant that operates the famed New York City arena in addition to Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, the Las Vegas Sphere and other prominent venues.
Croft sued him in January, claiming she had been hired to serve as a massage therapist for Glenn Frey during the 2013 tour, on which Dolan’s band (JD & The Straight Shot) opened for Eagles. She says she thought the job was the “opportunity of a lifetime,” but that she quickly realized the real reason she was there: “Dolan was extremely assertive, and pressured Ms. Croft into unwanted sexual intercourse.”
The lawsuit also claimed that Dolan later facilitated an incident in which Croft was assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced film producer whose many sexual assault allegations helped spark the #MeToo movement in 2017. Dolan previously served as a director at The Weinstein Company, and the lawsuit claimed that the two moguls were “close friends and business partners.”
In Monday’s response, Dolan’s attorneys took particular exception to the Weinstein allegations, calling them “scandalous and irrelevant” claims that had been designed to compensate for flaws in the case: “This transparent reliance on headline-grabbing, yet legally baseless, accusations of liability-by-association cannot save plaintiff’s case.”
Dolan’s motion also argued that the inclusion of Weinstein was actually a “fatal” weakness in one part of the case. They claimed that bankruptcy proceedings for The Weinstein Company resulted in a court order releasing all former directors from allegations that they aided and abetted Weinstein’s conduct — one of the claims leveled against Dolan in the complaint.
In a response statement on Wednesday, Croft’s attorney Douglas Wigdor called Dolan’s argument “shameful” and said his client had not participated in or benefited from the Weinstein bankruptcy, or even been notified of it.
“To somehow suggest that Dolan should receive a ‘get out of jail free’ card for his alleged intentional acts of trafficking our client, shows the extent to which he is willing to go to avoid having to defend the facts of our case,” Wigdor wrote.
Separately on Monday, attorneys for companies owned by music executive Irving Azoff also filed their own response to the case. While the lawsuit mostly centered on Dolan’s alleged conduct, it also accused the Azoff Company of violating federal sex trafficking laws by “facilitating Dolan’s behavior.”
In their motion, Azoff’s attorneys demanded not only that the claims be dismissed, but that Croft and her lawyers be legally sanctioned for filing “frivolous and vexatious” allegations without any real evidence to support them.
“As was explained to plaintiff’s counsel before the suit was commenced, the Azoff entities have never participated in any sex trafficking venture, and the complaint does not allege a single fact plausibly or remotely suggesting otherwise,” wrote the Azoff Company’s attorney Daniel Petrocelli.
“The decision by plaintiff and her counsel to include [such claims] in a federal pleading with nodiligence or investigation in order to publicly and falsely charge the Azoff Entities with despicable, illegal conduct fully justifies the imposition of … sanctions.”
In one portion of Croft’s complaint, her lawyers included a photograph of Dolan, Azoff and Weinstein standing together in 2015, saying that “these men were close to one another, and thus almost certainly knew details about each other’s personal lives.”
But in Monday’s motion seeking to dismiss the case and punish Croft’s lawyers, Azoff’s attorneys called the inclusion of Weinstein in the complaint a “gratuitous and unavailing” tactic that had been designed to prove “guilt-by-association” in the absence of any real evidence.
“Grasping at straws, plaintiff tries to link Weinstein to the Azoff entities by a single photo of Dolan, Weinstein, and Irving Azoff at an advertising trade conference in 2015,” Petrocelli wrote. “Awarding the Azoff entities their reasonable attorneys’ fees and costs in bringing this motion would deter plaintiff’s counsel from asserting such baseless, bad faith claims in the future.”
In his statement Wednesday, Croft’s attorney Wigdor called those arguments “meritless” and reiterated the allegations against Azoff’s companies: “We look forward to defeating these motions and moving forward with this litigation.”
Taylor Swift‘s father, Scott Swift, will not face charges after he was accused of assaulting a cameraman in Australia. Authorities confirmed in a statement to Billboard on Tuesday (March 26) that New South Wales police have decided not to take any further action in regards to Scott, who was accused last month of assaulting a […]
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: A legal battle between Michael Jackson’s mother and his estate over a massive deal; a ruling on Metallica’s COVID lawsuit that quotes Taylor Swift; a new first-of-its-kind statute in Tennessee aimed at AI-generated deepfakes; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Jackson Family Feud
Fifteen years after Michael Jackson’s death, his mother is locked in an increasingly acrimonious legal battle with his estate – and, as of last week, with her own grandson, too.
The trouble started last year, when Katherine Jackson filed legal objections to an unspecified transaction that had been proposed by the estate. The disputed deal wasn’t explicitly named in filings, but it appears to be the estimated $600 million catalog deal with Sony Music that was first reported by Billboard last month. A judge rejected those complaints in April 2023, but Katherine is now battling to overturn that ruling at a California appeals court.
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Why the sudden flashpoint last week? Because Katherine is asking the estate to pay for the legal bills she’s incurred while litigating her objections – a request that drew sharp rebukes.
One came from Michael’s son, Bigi Jackson, who says that Katherine’s ongoing objections to the Sony deal are a “waste” of time and that it would be “unfair” to force him and his siblings to foot the bill for them. Another came from estate executors John Branca and John McClain, who say the estate has already paid the elder Jackson more than $55 million since Michael’s death and shouldn’t have to pay for her “frivolous” appeal.
Go read our full stories on Bigi’s objections and the executors’ pushback, and stay tuned for how it all shakes out…
Other top stories this week…
METALLICA, COVID AND… TAYLOR? – Judges can be Swifties, too. In an unusual ruling that quoted from Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” a California appeals court rejected a lawsuit filed by the band Metallica that demanded its insurance company pay for more than $3 million in losses stemming from concerts that were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The case is one of numerous lawsuits, many of them unsuccessful, that have aimed at forcing insurance companies to pay for losses caused by pandemic cancellations.
DIDDY’S HOUSES RAIDED – Law enforcement agents reportedly searched homes owned by Sean “Diddy” Combs in Los Angeles and Miami as part of an ongoing sex trafficking investigation led by federal prosecutors in New York. The federal raids came amid a flurry of civil sexual abuse lawsuits against the hip-hop mogul – allegations Combs has strongly denied. It’s not clear whether the rapper himself is the target of the federal investigation.
NEW AI VOICE STATUTE – Tennessee enacted first-in-the-nation legislation aimed at protecting musical artists and other individuals from so-called deep fakes that are generated by artificial intelligence – an issue that’s been top of mind for the industry since a fake Drake song went viral last year. The new law – the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security, or ELVIS, Act – updates the state’s existing rules on image and likeness rights, explicitly including a person’s voice for the first time.
PYRRHI© VICTORY? – Six months after Sam Smith and Normani beat a copyright lawsuit claiming they had stolen elements of their 2019 hit “Dancing With a Stranger” from an earlier track, a federal judge refused to force their accuser to reimburse the legal fees they spent litigating the case — a bill the stars say exceeded $700,000. While unsuccessful, the judge ruled that the case was “neither frivolous nor objectively unreasonable.”
A pair of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami were reportedly raided by law enforcement on Monday (March 25).
Fox 11 reports that the raids were executed by Homeland Security “in connection” with an ongoing federal sex trafficking investigation.
Helicopters scoped out the chaotic scene in Holmby Hills. Fox added that the property was registered to Bad Boy Films under Diddy’s Bad Boy Entertainment entity along with one of the embattled mogul’s daughters.
With officers swarming the Los Angeles property, video footage appeared to show individuals being detained, two of whom appeared to be Diddy’s sons King Combs and Justin Combs. It’s unknown whether Diddy was at either home during the raids.
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TMZ reported on Monday that Homeland Security of New York launched the investigation and the Southern District of New York is handling the case linked to Diddy.
Billboard has reached out to Diddy’s reps for comment as well as the Los Angeles and Miami police departments.
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Diddy has been the subject of numerous sexual assault-related civil lawsuits. Ex-girlfriend Cassie lit the fuse in November 2023 with a lawsuit accusing Diddy of physical abuse, repeated sexual assault and trafficking while they were dating. The two parties agreed to settle the lawsuit less than 24 hours later.
Soon after, Combs was then sued by two other women who claimed they were sexually abused by the hip-hop mogul.
On Dec. 6, a fourth woman sued Diddy, claiming she was “sex trafficked” and “gang raped” by Combs, former Bad Boy Records president Harve Pierre and another man in 2003 when she was 17 years old.
In the months since, Diddy has been accused of sexual assault in several sprawling complaints. The Bad Boy CEO has denied any wrongdoing and attempted to clear his name with a December post to social media.
“ENOUGH IS ENOUGH,” he wrote. “For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy. Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”
A lawyer for Diddy vehemently denied the allegations against his client and referred to the accusations as “pure fiction.”
This is a developing story
A group of companies representing Spotify, Deezer, Epic Games and others, applauded the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple on Thursday (March 21), calling it a “strong stand against Apple’s stranglehold” on mobile apps.
“[Apple] stifles competition and hurts American consumers and developers alike,” Rick VanMeter, executive director for The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF), said in a statement. “As this case unfolds in the coming years more must be done now to end the anticompetitive practices of all mobile app gatekeepers.”
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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In its sweeping lawsuit filed in New Jersey federal court on Thursday, the U.S. Justice Department alleged that Apple violated antitrust laws by undermining apps and products that could compete with Apple or that could make customers less reliant on its iPhone systems, such as its digital wallet.
The U.S. case follows similar legal actions brought against Apple in the European Union, the United Kingdom and Asia, and it addresses some of the Apple policies that Spotify founder/CEO Daniel Ek has railed against for years.
“There’s global consensus that Apple’s abuses of its monopoly power have stifled innovation and threaten the digital economy,” Avery Gardiner, a lawyer and competition policy advocate for Spotify, wrote on X. “The DOJ case makes it clear that Apple harms the developers and creators who are hard at work to build the very best products and services for consumers.”
Both CAF and Gardiner acknowledged the DOJ’s case will take time to have any impact, and they urged Congress to pass The Open App Markets Act, a bill Ek has lobbied for since it was introduced in August 2021.
The Open App Markets Act would bar Apple, Google and other app stores with more than 50 million users from forcing app developers to use their payment systems as a condition of distribution. It would also block app store owners from punishing app developers if they extend deals to customers or offer their app for lower prices elsewhere.
Ek has argued that Apple and others act as anti-competitive gatekeepers because the terms required for inclusion in their app stores prevent Spotify and others from telling consumers about potentially cheaper bundle options, like Spotify’s duo and family plans. Currently, Spotify has to send customers to its website to sign up for those plans.
The Justice Department’s case also seeks for Apple to loosen restrictions on its messaging tools and to add features to the Apple wallet. Gardiner and CAF praised the case for what they described as an attempt to level the playing field.
“Competition is the foundation of innovation, and [this case] represents the latest step in the fight for a fair and competitive internet,” Gardiner wrote.
Michael Jackson’s estate claimed in legal filings Thursday (Mar. 21) that his mother, Katherine Jackson, has received more than $55 million since the singer’s death — a revelation that came during an acrimonious dispute between the estate’s executors and the elder Jackson.
The new filings, obtained by Billboard, were aimed at proving that the estate itself shouldn’t have to pay for Katherine’s recent legal bills, which stem from her efforts to block an unspecified business transaction — believed to be the estate’s recent estimated $600 million catalog deal with Sony.
In making that argument, estate executors John Branca and John McClain argued Thursday that “virtually no request of Mrs. Jackson for her care or maintenance has been declined” in the years since Michael’s 2009 death.
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“Contrary to claims made by Mrs. Jackson’s counsel, the executors have in fact provided liberally for Mrs. Jackson’s maintenance, care and well being,” attorneys for Branca and McClain wrote. “Since Michael’s death, the executors have expended for Mrs. Jackson’s benefit more than $55 million.”
The elder Jackson allegedly received more than $33 million in cash, including an ongoing allowance of $160,0000 per month, plus a $15 million luxury home, the estate claimed. Branca and McClain also claimed that they provided Katherine with an emergency $3.7 million payment in December to satisfy delinquent income tax liabilities.
“It is difficult to imagine that the trustees could provide any more liberally for Mrs. Jackson,” attorneys for the executors wrote.
Thursday’s filing is the latest development in an ongoing feud between Katherine and the executors over her opposition to the unspecified business transaction. While the disputed deal has not been named in court documents, the Jackson estate recently struck an estimated $600 million deal to sell part of the singer’s catalog to Sony, the terms of which were first reported by Billboard last month.
After the Jackson estate sought court approval for the unnamed deal in 2022, Katherine filed objections with the court. But in April 2023, the judge overseeing the estate rejected those objections and ruled that the deal could move forward. Katherine then filed an appeal, which is still pending.
In December, Katherine filed motions asking that the estate pay for the legal bills she had incurred in making her objections, including the ongoing appeal. In an initial response earlier this month, Branca and McClain strongly opposed the request to pay for what they called her “failed objection” and “meritless appeal.”
Earlier this week, Michael’s son Blanket echoed those objections, arguing that his grandmother’s appeal was an “extreme longshot” and that it would be “unfair” to force him and his siblings to pay for that case.
In their new filing on Thursday, Branca and McClain went even further — claiming that the estate should not have to pay Katherine’s lawyers for filing objections that had caused “substantial damage.”
“Importantly, this petition is not about Mrs. Jackson’s maintenance, care, comfort and support,” the executors’ attorneys wrote. “This petition is about payment of attorneys’ fees for an objection filed on Mrs. Jackson’s behalf, which the court overruled, and the subsequent, frivolous and still pending appeal.”
An attorney for Katherine Jackson did not immediately return a request for comment.
Tennessee governor Bill Lee signed the ELVIS Act into law Thursday (Mar. 21), legislation designed to further protect the state’s artists from artificial intelligence deep fakes. The bill, more formally named the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act of 2024, replaces the state’s old right of publicity law, which only included explicit protections for one’s “name, photograph, or likeness,” expanding protections to include voice- and AI-specific concerns for the first time.
Gov. Lee signed the bill into law from a local honky tonk, surrounded by superstar supporters like Luke Bryan and Chris Janson. Lee joked that it was “the coolest bill signing ever.”
The ELVIS Act was introduced by Gov. Lee in January along with State Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson (R-27) and House Majority Leader William Lambert (R-44), and it has since garnered strong support from the state’s artistic class. Talents like Lindsay Ell, Michael W. Smith, Natalie Grant, Matt Maher and Evanescence‘s David Hodges have been vocal in their support for the bill.
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It also gained support from the recorded music industry and the Human Artistry Campaign, a global initiative of entertainment organizations that pushes for a responsible approach to AI. The initiative has buy-in from more than 180 organizations worldwide, including the RIAA, NMPA, BMI, ASCAP, Recording Academy and American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).
Right of publicity protections vary state-to-state in the United States, leading to a patchwork of laws that make enforcing one’s ownership over one’s name, likeness and voice more complicated. There is an even greater variation among right of publicity laws postmortem. As AI impersonation concerns have grown more prevalent over the last year, there has been a greater push by the music business to gain a federal right of publicity.
The ELVIS Act replaces the Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984, which was passed, in part, to extend Elvis Presley‘s publicity rights after he passed away. (At the time, Tennessee did not recognize a postmortem right of publicity). Along with explicitly including a person’s voice as a protected right for the first time, the ELVIS Act also broadens which uses of one’s name, image, photograph and voice are barred.
Previously, the Personal Rights Protection Act only banned uses of a person’s name, photograph and likeness “for purpose of advertising,” which would not include the unauthorized use of AI voices for performance purposes. The ELVIS Act does not limit liability based on context, so it would likely bar any unauthorized use, including in a documentary, song or book, among other mediums.
The federal government is also working on solutions to address publicity rights concerns. Within hours of Gov. Lee’s introduction of the ELVIS Act in Tennessee back in January, a bipartisan group of U.S. House lawmakers revealed the No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications Act (No AI FRAUD Act), which aims to establish a framework for protecting one’s voice and likeness on a federal level and lays out First Amendment protections. It is said to complement the Senate’s Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES Act), a draft bill that was introduced last October.
While most of the music business is aligned on creating a federal right of publicity, David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), warned in a speech delivered at an Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) meeting in February that “while we are 100% supportive of the record labels’ priority to get a federal right of publicity…it does not have a good chance. Within the copyright community, we don’t even agree on [it]. Guess who doesn’t want a federal right of publicity? Film and TV. Guess who’s bigger than the music industry? Film and TV.”
The subject of AI voice cloning has been a controversial topic in the music business since Ghostwriter released the so-called “Fake-Drake” song “Heart On My Sleeve,” which used the AI technology without permission. In some cases, this form of AI can present novel creative opportunities — including its use for pitch records, lyric translations, estate marketing and fan engagement — but it also poses serious threats. If an artist’s voice is cloned by AI without their permission or knowledge, it can confuse, offend, mislead or even scam fans.
Michael Jackson’s son Blanket is asking a Los Angeles judge to stop his grandmother from using money from the iconic singer’s estate to fund her ongoing legal battles against the estate’s executors over their recent $600 million deal with Sony.
In court filings obtained by Billboard, Blanket argued Monday that the estate shouldn’t foot the bill for Katherine Jackson’s pending appeal, in which she’s challenging a ruling last year that gave co-executors John Branca and John McClain approval to proceed with an unnamed transaction.
While the disputed deal itself is not explicitly named in legal documents, it appears to be the Jackson estate’s estimated $600 million deal to sell part of the singer’s catalog to Sony, the terms of which were first reported by Billboard last month.
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Monday’s objections highlight a recent rift between Katherine and Blanket. Both of them initially opposed the estate’s proposed transaction, but after the judge ruled last year that the deal could move forward, Blanket and Jackson’s other children accepted the decision. Katherine opted instead to keep fighting, filing an appeal that remains pending.
In December, Katherine filed motions asking that the estate pay for her legal bills stemming from her objections, including the ongoing appellate case. But in his filing on Monday, Blanket said it would be “unfair” to force him and his siblings to pay for that case, since his grandmother’s efforts face “long odds.”
“It is readily apparent that a reversal on appeal would be an extreme longshot,” wrote lawyers for Blanket, who now uses the name Bigi. “Given those odds, Bigi decided not to waste his resources to participate in an appeal. Nonetheless, Katherine has decided to appeal this court’s ruling. That decision is not for the benefit of the heirs.”
It’s unclear exactly how much Katherine is seeking. In a court filing earlier this month, Branca and McClain said she had asked for more than $561,548 to cover her legal fees for both her initial objections and the current appeal. In that filing, the executors said they strongly opposed any estate payments for her “failed objection” and “meritless appeal.”
In his filing Monday, Blanket didn’t entirely oppose his grandmother’s request. He argued that the estate should, in fact, pay her legal bills for her initial opposition to the deal — arguing that she had presented “essential evidence” about the proposed transaction and that “all heirs and beneficiaries benefited from this court’s scrutiny.”
But he also argued the actual dollar total she had requested “might be high,” and questioned whether she had really needed to hire “four lawyers charging fees of $840 to $1,400 per hour.” And he argued any legal fees for the ongoing appeal should be entirely denied, since the ruling allowing the deal to proceed had been “reasoned and detailed.”
“Katherine’s petition has the practical effect of requiring Bigi and his siblings pay for her appeal,” Blanket wrote. “It would be unfair to make those beneficiaries shoulder this burden when they expressly decided an appeal would not be in their best interests.”
An attorney for Katherine Jackson did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Reps for the Jackson estate declined to comment.
In an unusual ruling that quoted from Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” a California appeals court has rejected Metallica’s lawsuit demanding that its insurance company pay for more than $3 million in losses stemming from concerts that were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The decision, issued Monday (March 18) by California’s Court of Appeal, said that six COVID-cancelled 2020 shows in South America were not covered by Metallica’s insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London, thanks to a clear exclusion in the contract for any losses stemming from “communicable diseases.”
The legendary rock band had argued the case should have gone to trial, since a jury could have decided that non-COVID reasons led to the cancellations. But Justice Maria Stratton, improbably citing Swift, said it was “absurd to think that government closures were not the result of Covid-19.”
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“To paraphrase Taylor Swift: ‘We were there. We remember it all too well,’” the justice wrote. “There was no vaccine against Covid-19 in March 2020 and no drugs to treat it. Ventilators were in short supply. N-95 masks were all but non-existent. Patients were being treated in tents in hospital parking lots. The mortality rate of Covid-19 was unknown, but to give just one example of the potential fatality rate, by late March, 2020, New York City was using refrigerated trucks as temporary morgues. People were terrified.”
Metallica’s case is one of many that have been filed by musicians, venues, bars and other businesses seeking insurance coverage for harm caused by the outbreak of COVID-19, which led to months of severe travel restrictions, forced closures and bans on large gatherings.
But like Metallica’s case, the majority of those lawsuits have thus far been won by insurers. Many policies included express carveouts for problems caused by diseases, like the one in the band’s contract; other policies, like many for brick-and-mortar businesses, often required “physical damage” that’s tricky to show with a pandemic shutdown.
The biggest such case in the music industry is a sweeping lawsuit filed by Live Nation, seeking coverage from Factory Mutual Insurance Co. for more than 10,000 shows (encompassing a whopping 15 million tickets) that were canceled or postponed during the pandemic. After a judge refused to dismiss Live Nation’s allegations in 2022, the case remains pending.
Metallica sued Lloyd’s of London in June 2021 after the insurer refused to cover their losses stemming from the South American tour, which had been set to kick off on April 15, 2020, but was postponed when the governments of Argentina, Chile and Brazil imposed strict restrictions amid the worsening pandemic.
Court documents show that in May 2020, the band submitted a loss of $3,234,569 stemming from the cancelled shows, covering things like $184,996 in payroll for retained crew members. But citing the disease exclusion, the insurer quickly denied the claim: “Unfortunately we have to advise that no coverage is afforded for this matter under this Policy,” the company wrote in a June 2020 response letter.
In December 2022, a Los Angeles judge rejected Metallica’s case and the various arguments for why Lloyds should have paid for the concerts — including ruling that the cancellations were caused by travel restrictions that were “a direct response to the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic.”
Appealing that decision, Metallica argued that a jury might have found a different cause for the concert cancellations. The band’s attorneys pointed to the fact that venues later reopened and the shows were performed in 2022, “despite the ongoing presence of COVID.”
But in her ruling Monday, Justice Stratton said that argument missed the mark. With the advent of vaccines and more information, “much had changed” by the spring of 2022.
“People were in a position to make a more accurate cost-benefit analysis of restrictions versus potential illness,” the justice wrote. “The fact that governments chose to lift restrictions at that point, two years after COVID-19 was first discovered, does not in any way call into question their reasons for imposing travel restrictions early in the pandemic.”
The judge also rejected various other arguments from Metallica, like the claim that the policy did not cover COVID cancellations because it did not specifically use the term “virus”: “The insurance policy definition of communicable disease does not refer to any pathogens nor does it limit the exclusion to only those communicable diseases caused by specific pathogens.”
Attorneys for both sides did not immediately return requests for comment.
