Supreme Court
If the Supreme Court upholds a U.S. law that would ban TikTok if its Chinese parent company ByteDance fails to sell it by Jan. 19, it would be bad news for the music industry, including the live events business – which has increasingly relied on TikTok as a marketing engine in recent years.
A decision by the court could be days, even hours, away, and it will have a major impact on dozens of U.S. industries that rely on the site for marketing, including the live music business during one of its busiest marketing months. TikTok’s popularity among concert and festival marketers has increased significantly in the last two years, explains FanIQ CEO Jesse Lawrence, as the event industry shifts to content-based marketing models.
“The music industry is finally getting away from the static lineup ad and embracing storytelling and lifestyle content,” said Lawrence, who notes that the the company is seeing a return of 15 to 20 times its ad spend on TikTok.
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Part of the appeal of TikTok, Lawrence said, is that the learning curve for posting and sharing ads on the platform is fairly simple. Customers are separated into two buckets: upper funnel, which includes essentially new customers who know little, if anything, about an upcoming event, and lower funnel, in which clients have gained awareness and are close to making a final decision on a purchase.
“Our whole approach is about matching upper funnel engagement, based on the user’s interests, with content we’ve created around the festival,” says Lawrence. That includes using beauty and fashion content to find potential customers for a summer country music festival, sneaker content for hip-hop festivals or skateboarding and surfing content to market a punk rock and action sports expo.
“Our videos have a watch time tracker and if someone watches the video for 15 seconds or more, the next video they’ll get is one with specific details about the festival and specific videos instructions on conversion,” meaning buying tickets, Lawrence said. He later noted, “it’s just about knowing where your audience is spending time and putting content in front of them on those platforms.”
A recent content piece FanIQ created for the Oceanfront Festival detailed rapper Key Glock’s extensive sneaker collection, featuring interview snippets with the Memphis rapper.
“That video is getting served to the fan from the festival’s account,” Lawrence said. “The whole idea is that we’re taking content that feels very organic and putting it into paid (content).”
Lawrence encourages his clients to use multiple social media platforms – Snap, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and Spotify — for their marketing campaigns, noting that each platform is home to a different audience.
FanIQ is one of the new systems that “aggregates performance across every platform,” Lawrence explained. “We want to give them this access so they can easily understand what’s working, do more of it where we’re seeing performance, and scale back where we’re not.”
Will Franklin with UK marketing firm Round says the strength of TikTok as a marketing platform for the live music business comes from its early success helping artists go viral, starting with the release of “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X in December 2018. In 2020, Meghan Thee Stallion’s tracks “WAP” and “Savage” — used in countless dance videos by contributors to the platform — made her the No. 1 most played artist on TikTok that year and helped her land headliner slots at a number of major festivals in 2021 including Lollapalooza.
Franklin also notes that fans are increasingly looking to TikTok for video and content from events, noting that searches for the Boomtown festival in the U.K. soared from 29.5 million in the month leading up to the event to 266.8 million during the festival, creating increased awareness around the band.
Many marketers are holding out hope that TikTok will receive a last-minute reprieve from the Supreme Court, but several news outlets covering the hearing reported that a majority of the court’s justices expressed a lack of support for overturning the current ban. If the site is outlawed in the U.S., Franklin says he believes YouTube Shorts will temporarily fill the void.
“I haven’t seen huge budget shifts from TikTok to YouTube yet, but a lot of my clients are experimenting and spending small allocations on different platforms in case they do have to make a shift,” Franklin explains. “There’s a hesitancy because no other platform has as many Gen Z users as TikTok, but the assumption is that if the site is banned, its user will go somewhere else. For now all we can do is guess which platform that may be.”
If the Supreme Court does not intervene to save TikTok, it will be removed from U.S. app stores on Jan. 19 but remain live on users’ phones, albeit without regular push software updates to fix bugs and glitches. ByteDance might be able to maneuver and keep the platform online for a few months after the cut-off date, but the company hasn’t unveiled any of its contingency plans.
“We’re advising client partners to be cautious but optimistic, and recommending they pause TikTok media spend starting Jan. 18 to avoid any unforeseen investment complications,” said Kerry McKibbin, president/partner at ad agency Mischief @ No Fixed Address, adding that advertisers should familiarize themselves with the shorts platforms on both YouTube and Meta if they are concerned about a TikTok shutdown.
In one of the most important cases of the social media age, free speech and national security collide at the Supreme Court on Friday in arguments over the fate of TikTok, a wildly popular digital platform that roughly half the people in the United States use for entertainment and information.
TikTok says it plans to shut down the social media site in the U.S. by Jan. 19 unless the Supreme Court strikes down or otherwise delays the effective date of a law aimed at forcing TikTok’s sale by its Chinese parent company.
Working on a tight deadline, the justices also have before them a plea from President-elect Donald Trump, who has dropped his earlier support for a ban, to give him and his new administration time to reach a “political resolution” and avoid deciding the case. It’s unclear if the court will take the Republican president-elect’s views — a highly unusual attempt to influence a case — into account.
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TikTok and China-based ByteDance, as well as content creators and users, argue the law is a dramatic violation of the Constitution’s free speech guarantee.
“Rarely if ever has the court confronted a free-speech case that matters to so many people,” lawyers for the users and content creators wrote. Content creators are anxiously awaiting a decision that could upend their livelihoods and are eyeing other platforms.
The case represents another example of the court being asked to rule about a medium with which the justices have acknowledged they have little familiarity or expertise, though they often weigh in on meaty issues involving restrictions on speech.
The Biden administration, defending the law that President Joe Biden signed in April after it was approved by wide bipartisan majorities in Congress, contends that “no one can seriously dispute that (China’s) control of TikTok through ByteDance represents a grave threat to national security.”
Officials say Chinese authorities can compel ByteDance to hand over information on TikTok’s U.S. patrons or use the platform to spread or suppress information.
But the government “concedes that it has no evidence China has ever attempted to do so,” TikTok told the justices, adding that limits on speech should not be sustained when they stem from fears that are predicated on future risks.
In December, a panel of three appellate judges, two appointed by Republicans and one by a Democrat, unanimously upheld the law and rejected the First Amendment speech claims.
Adding to the tension, the court is hearing arguments just nine days before the law is supposed to take effect and 10 days before a new administration takes office.
In language typically seen in a campaign ad rather than a legal brief, lawyers for Trump have called on the court to temporarily prevent the TikTok ban from going into effect but refrain from a definitive resolution.
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged,” D. John Sauer, Trump’s choice to be his administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote in a legal brief filed with the court.
Trump took no position on the underlying merits of the case, Sauer wrote. Trump’s campaign team used TikTok to connect with younger voters, especially male voters, and Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, in December. He has 14.7 million followers on TikTok.
The justices have set aside two hours for arguments, and the session likely will extend well beyond that. Three highly experienced Supreme Court lawyers will be making arguments. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar will present the Biden administration’s defense of the law, while Trump’s solicitor general in his first administration, Noel Francisco, will argue on behalf of TikTok and ByteDance. Stanford Law professor Jeffrey Fisher, representing content creators and users, will be making his 50th high court argument.
If the law takes effect, Trump’s Justice Department will be charged with enforcing it. Lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the new administration could seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences.
But they also said that a shutdown of just a month would cause TikTok to lose about one-third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
As it weighs the case, the court will have to decide what level of review it applies to the law. Under the most searching review, strict scrutiny, laws almost always fail. But two judges on the appellate court that upheld the law said it would be the rare exception that could withstand strict scrutiny.
TikTok, the app’s users and many briefs supporting them urge the court to apply strict scrutiny to strike down the law.
But the Democratic administration and some of its supporters cite restrictions on foreign ownership of radio stations and other sectors of the economy to justify the effort to counter Chinese influence in the TikTok ban.
A decision could come within days.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was revealed to have not disclosed a pair of trips paid for by a billionaire patron, according to a new report released over the weekend. Democrats in the Senate released their findings after a 20-month probe of ethical practices of the highest court in the land.
The New York Times examined the 93-page report from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democratic Party members which was supported with around 800 pages of additional documents. Among the committee’s findings were two previously undisclosed trips in 2021 taken by Justice Clarence Thomas and provided by real estate mogul, Harlan Crow of Texas.
One trip shows Thomas flying from Nebraska to Saranac, N.Y. in July 2021 on a private chartered flight to visit Crow’s retreat in the upstate region for five days. The other undisclosed trip took place the same year in October when Crow invited Thomas to his yacht for an overnight trip after flying the justice from Washington to New Jersey.
The committee’s report and its findings come after Thomas had previously refiled some of his past financial forms, with the additional details coming forth after the committee threatened to present Crow with a subpoena.
A spokesperson for Crow shared a statement saying that Crow handed over the information about the trips without resistance and called the inquiry into his dealings with Thomas “political, partisan, and unconstitutional from the start.”
Justice Samuel Alito Jr. also didn’t disclose a 2008 trip to Alaska via private jet that was paid for by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Alito said that according to the rules at the time, he was not obligated to share details of that trip.
The outlet rightly notes that the Supreme Court has operated for much of its existence without an ethics code in place, an approach that does not extend to the lower courts.
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Photo: Getty
The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it will hear arguments next month over the constitutionality of the federal law that could ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company doesn’t sell it.
The justices will hear arguments Jan. 10 about whether the law impermissibly restricts speech in violation of the First Amendment.
The law, enacted in April, set a Jan. 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold or else face a ban in the United States. The popular social media platform has more than 170 million users in the U.S.
It’s unclear how quickly a decision might come. But the high court still could act after the arguments to keep the law from taking effect pending a final ruling, if at least five of the nine justices think it’s unconstitutional.
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Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance had urged the justices to step in before Jan. 19. The high court also will hear arguments from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some TikTok users.
The timing of the arguments means that the outgoing Biden administration’s Justice Department will make the case in defense of the law that passed Congress with bipartisan support and was signed by Democratic President Joe Biden in April.
The incoming Republican administration might not have the same view of the law.
President-elect Donald Trump, who once supported a ban but then pledged during the campaign to “save TikTok,” has said his administration would take a look at the situation. Trump met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Monday.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about one-third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
The case pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
A panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously upheld the law on Dec. 6, then denied an emergency plea to delay the law’s implementation.
Without court action, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that Trump’s Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences. Trump takes office a day after the law is supposed to go into effect.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was expected from content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
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The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court.
The same panel had earlier unanimously upheld the law over a First Amendment challenge claiming that it violated free speech rights.
Without a court-ordered freeze, the law would take effect Jan. 19 and expose app stores that offer TikTok and internet hosting services that support it to potential fines.
It would be up to the Justice Department to enforce the law, investigating possible violations and seeking sanctions. But lawyers for TikTok and ByteDance have argued that the Justice Department might pause enforcement or otherwise seek to mitigate the law’s most severe consequences because President-elect Donald Trump pledged during the campaign that he would “save TikTok.”
Trump takes office a day after the law goes into effect.
The Supreme Court could temporarily put the law on hold so that they can give fuller consideration to First Amendment and other issues.
On the other hand, the justices could reject the emergency appeal, which would allow the law to take effect as scheduled.
The case has made a relatively quick trip through the courts once bipartisan majorities in Congress approved the law and President Joe Biden signed it in April.
This story was originally published by The Associated Press.
Nearly five years after the major labels won a $1 billion music piracy verdict against Cox Communications, the U.S. Supreme Court is signaling that it might jump into the long-running copyright case.
In an order issued Monday (Nov. 25), the justices asked the Justice Department to weigh in on whether the high court should tackle the huge penalty, which Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Warner Music Group (WMG) won back in 2019 over allegations of widespread piracy by Cox’s users.
After an appeals court ordered the award recalculated earlier this year, both sides have asked the Supreme Court to take the case. The labels want the justices to reinstate the original verdict; Cox wants the high court to overturn it entirely.
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Such petitions are always a long shot, as the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the more than 7,000 cases it receives each year. But Monday’s order — a “call for the view of the Solicitor General,” or CVSG, in SCOTUS parlance — is a relatively rare step that indicates that the justices think the issues in the case might be significant enough for the court to tackle.
UMG, SME and WMG all sued Cox in 2018, seeking to hold the internet giant itself liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by its users. The labels said Cox had ignored hundreds of thousands of infringement notices and had never permanently terminated a single subscriber accused of stealing music.
ISPs like Cox are often shielded from lawsuits over illegal downloading by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. But a judge ruled that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate people who were repeatedly accused of violating copyright law. Stripped of that immunity, jurors held Cox liable in December 2019 for the infringement of 10,017 separate songs and awarded the labels more than $99,000 for each song, adding up to $1 billion.
Earlier this year, a federal appeals court overturned that award, ruling that aspects of the verdict weren’t supported by the law. But the appeals court also upheld other parts, and Cox is still facing the potential of a very large penalty when damages are recalculated.
In taking the case to the Supreme Court, Cox has urged the justices to undo the entire verdict. The company has issued dire warnings, arguing that the “draconian” approach applied in the case “threatens mass disruption” by potentially forcing ISPs to terminate internet service to thousands of Americans.
“The stakes are immense,” Cox’s attorneys wrote. “This court should grant certiorari to prevent these cases from creating confusion, disruption, and chaos on the internet. Innovation, privacy, and competition depend on it.”
Firing back, the labels have called those arguments “disingenuous” and instead urged the court to take up their own separate petition seeking to reinstate the entire verdict.
“This court should take Cox’s concerns about terminating internet access with a healthy serving of salt,” attorneys for UMG, SME and WMG wrote. “During the time period at issue here, Cox terminated over 600,000 subscribers for not paying their bills. When Cox’s money is on the line, Cox clearly has no problem ‘irreparably cutting’ its customers ‘off from society.’”
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from R. Kelly over his 2022 convictions on child pornography and enticement charges, leaving him with no further direct appeals from a verdict that saw him sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Kelly’s attorneys had urged the high court to take up the case, in which a federal jury in Chicago convicted him in September 2022, by arguing that the case should have been barred by the statute of limitations.
But in an order Monday, the justices declined to tackle the case. As is typical, the court did not explain its decision to reject Kelly’s case along with dozens of others. The Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions per year and only decides to hear a tiny fraction them.
Monday’s order dealt only one of Kelly’s two sets of sex abuse convictions. The other — a September 2021 guilty verdict on racketeering charges brought by prosecutors in New York that resulted in a 30-year prison sentence — is still 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. The conviction was affirmed by a lower appeals court earlier this year.
In asking the justices to consider overturning that ruling, Kelly’s attorney Jennifer Bonjean cited the statute of limitations. She said that an updated federal law extending the time limit, passed in 2003, could not be applied retroactively to Kelly’s alleged crimes, which occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Retroactive application of the 2003 amendment not only fly in the face of congressional intent,” Bonjean writes. “It violates notions of fundamental fairness.”
Barring an unusual outcome at some point in the future, Monday’s decision effectively finalized Kelly’s convictions and sentencing in the Chicago case. The separate convictions in the New York case could still be overturned, however, either by the lower appeals court or by the Supreme Court.
Kelly’s attorney 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.”
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Source: Cook County Department of Corrections / Cook County Department of Corrections
R. Kelly is exploring yet another route in order to get his freedom back. He is asking the Supreme Court to review his federal sex crimes case.
As spotted on TMZ, the disgraced entertainer might have a legal ace up his sleeve. This week, his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean confirmed she formally submitted a petition asking for his case to be reevaluated. According to the US Courts, a writ of certiorari is a “a request that the Supreme Court order a lower court to send up the record of the case for review.” In essence, she is making a statute of limitations argument where the actions he was accused of occurred in the 1990s/early 2000s and he was charged with a law that did not exist yet.
Jennifer Bonjean appeared on TMZ and explained this is not the first time this technicality was brought to the court. “Yes, we raised this issue pre-trial and it was denied” she said. “The government’s position is that they admit they applied a statute of limitations that did not exist at the time the conduct was allegedly committed. But they are saying that ‘we were permitted to extend it’ nor did it ‘harm’ him or ‘violate’ him.
R. Kelly was convicted on three counts of child pornography and three counts of inducement back in 2020. He was sentenced to 20 years and is slated to be released in 2045.
Bette Midler is going down the yellow brick road to justice. The Grammy and Tony Award winner took to social media on Tuesday (July 2) to share a Wizard of Oz parody song that calls out several Supreme Court Justices, including Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. “Neil and Brett, […]