From The Hollywood Reporter: Eminem’s publisher Eight Mile Style has filed a major new lawsuit claiming Spotify has infringed hundreds of song copyrights and challenging the constitutionality of a recently passed music licensing law. In a suit filed Wednesday in federal court in Nashville, Eight Mile accuses Spotify of willful copyright infringement by reproducing “Lose … Read more
From The New Zealand Herald: The National Party is battling a ruling over how much it must pay for breaching copyright in a 2014 election ad, which played a song similar to Eminem’s Lose Yourself. Lawyers for the party are in the Court of Appeal in Wellington this morning, arguing the total damages of about $600,000 … Read more
From The Hollywood Reporter: When New Zealand’s National Party used in a television ad campaign a song that sounded much like Eminem’s 2002 hit “Lose Yourself,” it got sued. Earlier this year, a High Court in New Zealand held a two-week trial where Eminem’s music publisher aimed to demonstrate the political party’s ad campaign amounted to a … Read more
Largeness as such is not bad. Freedom is not threatened just because some become very rich, or because there are only a handful of big players. The poor quality of Big Macs or Quarter Pounders does not mean that you can’t get a good hamburger from somewhere else. The danger in media concentration comes not … Read more
From Billboard: An important chapter in the legal history of the music business may be coming to conclusion soon as Universal Music Group is close to submitting a settlement resolving claims that it cheated recording artists of royalties from digital downloads. The putative class action from artists including Chuck D. of Public Enemy, Rick James (by way of trust), Dave … Read more
From Marketplace: Music will rake in $41 billion by 2030, according to a recent report from Goldman Sachs — over 80 percent of that from streaming sites like Spotify or Pandora. Thing is, every time a song is streamed online, somebody’s getting paid royalties. Now a new company is capitalizing on this growth in a novel way. Every … Read more
From Fenwick & West LP: For the fifth time this session, and following fast on the heels of its landmark decision in TC Heartland v. Kraft Foods earlier in May, the Supreme Court again reversed the Federal Circuit. The case, Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc., significantly expands the scope of the patent exhaustion … Read more
From Forbes blogs: The dispute between artists and labels over the income earned from digital downloads continues to rage. Traditionally, record labels sold physical copies of music mediums, like CDs, and then would pay a royalty to the artist for each record sold. When iTunes came on the scene in 2001, the labels treated the … Read more