licensing
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Try using some of your favorite songs on the short-form video app Triller, and you’ll be hard pressed to find what you’re looking for.
On Thursday, the music catalogs for Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music and Merlin — which provides digital licensing to many top independent labels and distributors — were removed from the platform.
A Triller spokesperson says the platform is “reassessing each of our label deals as they come due as our catalogue music usage is a small fraction of our overall business with creators.
“Some labels are more used than others and if we can make financial arrangements which make sense for the platform, on a label by label basis, we will. In other cases the usage does not justify the cost.”
The news follows a lawsuit filed by Sony Music Entertainment in August, claiming Triller had “historically failed to make payments in a timely manner” but that this issue got even worse in March 2022 when Triller “failed to make any monthly payments required under the Agreement, totaling millions of dollars.”
A source at one of the other major music companies says similar breach of contract and failure to make payments, including “millions and millions in past due royalties,” was behind Triller’s decision to pull these catalogs. The Triller spokesperson, however, called that claim “false and grossly inaccurate.”
Representatives for Universal, Warner, Sony and Merlin declined to comment.
In a Thursday morning email, Merlin’s senior director of business and legal affairs alerted members that Triller had “commenced the takedown of Merlin content.” He continued, writing “at this stage we do not believe that Merlin is the only licensor/content provider to have had content taken down. The term of our current agreement with Triller has now expired. We will update members as soon as we can regarding renewal discussions.”
Merlin members include Secretly Group, Mom + Pop, Monstercat, Symphonic, Ninja Tune, Beggars Group, FUGA, ONErpm, Domino, SubPop, Vydia and more. The Triller spokesperson told Billboard when asked about the Merlin email, “We are in active conversations with Merlin and expect to renew our relationship and continue our friendly and successful partnership.”
“As Triller has grown and expanded its portfolio of services for creators as an open-garden platform, we are recalibrating some of our partnerships with a focus towards showcasing talent and maximizing their monetization,” that statement continued.
A glance at Triller’s Discover Music page shows that there are now few official music options available after the takedowns, and the promoted new releases and top picks are largely artists with no label affiliation. The only traces left of some label-signed artists are available through searching “OG Sounds,” which are typically user-created soundtracks like remixes that sometimes contain copyrighted material, or if a signed artist collaborated as a feature on a song released independently.
The public rift between Triller and the music business dates back to about 2020, when chairman and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) David Israelite criticized the app in an Instagram post, saying Triller needed to fully license its members works. “It’s a simple proposition – license songs before you use them,” he wrote.
In November of that year, Wixen Music Publishing filed a 15-page lawsuit against Triller, suing the company for $50 million dollars, stating in the complaint that Wixen felt encouraged when Triller’s CEO appeared to agree with the NMPA’s criticism that summer, but then, after months with no agreement reached, Wixen opted to file the lawsuit.
In the indictment, Wixen alleged Triller had “brazenly disregarded copyright law and committed willful and ongoing copyright infringement,” of its more than 1,000 song catalog. The lawsuit was dismissed in February 2021.
Eventually, in March 2021, Triller came to an agreement with the NMPA on behalf of its members.
Also in early 2021, Universal Music abruptly pulled its catalog from Triller, saying the app “shamefully withheld” artist payments. A source familiar with the matter told Billboard at the time that the payments UMG claims Triller is withholding went back several months. Three months later, the two companies announced a new, worldwide licensing agreement, spanning recorded music and publishing and restoring the UMG catalog to the app.
This August, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz also sued Triller for failing to make payments due on the sale of their popular Verzuz livestream series the year prior. They claimed the platform still owed them $28 million from the deal 18 months later. That lawsuit was settled in September.
Outside of music, there have been other claims against Triller for allegedly failing to make owed payments. Boxing journalist Dan Rafael reported that Triller had not fully paid several fighters and crew members from a May 2022 fight. In August, the Washington Post reported that Triller “promised millions to Black creators” to use the app as part of a paid influencer program, but “nearly a year after…its payments to many creators have been erratic — and in some cases, nonexistent.” In September, it was also sued by a smartphone app consulting firm that said it was owed more than $132,000 in unpaid fees.
Over the past two years, Triller has repeatedly announced plans to go public but has so far failed to do so — initially through the formerly-popular ‘SPAC’ merger process, and then in June this year filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it plans to take a more traditional IPO route. In late September, the company announced it had secured $310 million from Luxembourg-based private alternative investment group for a 36-month term following a public listing of Triller’s common stock and would aim for a public listing by early in the fourth fiscal quarter (October-December).
A new lawsuit claims that CNN used more than 100 different songs in international segments without paying for them, constituting copyright infringement on a “breathtaking scale.”
Freeplay Music, a company that sells so-called production music for use in web videos, television segments and other content – and hasn’t been afraid to sue over it – claims the cable news giant used the company’s library of music as “their own personal cookie jar” for segments on CNN Philippines, CNN Indonesia, CNN Chile.
“As high-profile news media companies which strive to provide the best news product all across the world, CNN and the international parties know they must obtain a license to use other’s intellectual property,” Freeplay’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Despite this, they willfully and consciously did not do so here on a breathtaking scale.”
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in California federal court, claimed that CNN used 115 songs across 283 segments. And Freeplay’s lawyers say they were “not minor uses” but rather “essential to each of the segment” – allegedly often used throughout entire segments.
Discovering the illicit use of their music in foreign media segments was like “finding a needle in a haystack,” Freeplay’s lawyers say, but that CNN knew that when it allegedly stole the music: “CNN apparently counted on the difficulty of being caught in deciding to engage in this massive willful copyright infringement.”
Freeplay is seeking at least $17 million in damages, saying anything less “would not get the attention of these media goliaths that continue to commit widespread infringement of FPM’s intellectual property.”
A spokesperson for CNN did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
The case is hardly Freeplay’s first. Court records show that the company has filed dozens of similar copyright lawsuits over alleged unauthorized uses of its music, including cases against online retail giant Alibaba and guitar maker Gibson. Most recently, Freeplay sued Ford Motor Co. in 2020 over accusations that the car company had used 54 different songs in online promotional videos but was was “too cheap” to pay for them.
Ford later countersued in that case, accusing Freeplay of actively seeking out litigation with “bait-and-switch” practices. The carmaker said Freeplay falsely advertises that its music is free to lure companies and individuals to the platform, only to later sue them “to extort vast amounts of money” when they used the music.
“Freeplay has asserted copyright infringement claims in dozens of lawsuits, extracting settlements in these litigations and … in an untold number of other instances where the simple threat of litigation was enough to shake down Internet users who mistakenly thought they were getting exactly what Freeplay advertises – music that was “free” to use,” Ford’s lawyers wrote at the time.
The case between Freeplay and Ford ended in a settlement last year.
Kanye West is facing a copyright lawsuit over allegations that his “Life of the Party” illegally sampled a song by the pioneering rap group Boogie Down Productions – the latest in a string of such infringement case against the embattled rapper.
In a complaint filed Monday in New York federal court, Phase One Network (the group that owns Boogie Down’s copyrights) says Ye incorporated key aspects from the 1986 song “South Bronx” into “Life of the Party,” which was released in 2021 on West’s Stem Player streaming platform.
How do they know he did so? Phase One says West’s people reached out to clear the use of the Boogie Down song – and then released it anyway when a deal was never struck.
“The communications confirmed that ‘South Bronx’ had been incorporated into the infringing track even though West had yet to obtain such license,” Phase One’s lawyers wrote. “Despite the fact that final clearance for use of ‘South Bronx’ in the infringing track was never authorized, the infringing track wa nevertheless reproduced, sold, distributed, publicly performed and exploited.”
Amid his many, many other problems over the last year, West has been repeatedly sued for illegally sampling or interpolating in his tracks. In May, a Texas pastor named David P. Moten accused the rapper of sampling from his recorded sermon in “Come to Life.” In June he was sued again, that time for using a snippet of Marshall Jefferson’s 1986 house track “Move Your Body” in the song “Flowers.”
Though they’re coming at a faster clip in recent months, such lawsuits are nothing new for West. In 2019, he and Pusha T were sued for sampling George Jackson‘s “I Can’t Do Without You” on the track “Come Back Baby.” That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio snippet of a young girl praying in his 2016 song “Ultralight Beam.”
Further back, West was hit with similar cases over allegedly unlicensed samples used in “New Slaves,” “Bound 2,” “My Joy.” And thought he isn’t named in the case, Universal Music Group is currently facing a lawsuit that claims West used an initially-unlicensed sample of King Crimson’s 1969 “21st Century Schizoid Man” in his 2010 track “Power.”
In the new lawsuit, Phase One’s lawyers say West used an “exact reproduction” of “South Bronx,” featuring the song’s horn hits, a melodic figure and a drum fill. The company says it controls both the publishing and recording copyrights to the song, and accuses West of infringing both.
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.
Read the entire lawsuit here: