A live performance from Eminem, whose publishing company is pushing for summary judgement in a high-stakes copyright infringement battle with Spotify. Photo Credit: EJ Hersom
The judge overseeing the years-running copyright infringement legal battle between Spotify and Eminem publisher Eight Mile Style has unsealed the case’s docket, revealing a number of noteworthy details in the process.
District Judge Aleta A. Trauger just recently unsealed the docket, which co-defendants Spotify and the Harry Fox Agency (HFA) had sought to keep out of the public eye. We reported on one such motion from Spotify nearly four years ago, with the original complaint itself dating back to August of 2019 and concerning alleged infringing conduct much older than that.
By way of quick background — the past five or so years have delivered depositions, well over 1,000 pages of expert remarks alone, and a whole lot else — Eight Mile added HFA as a defendant in the summer of 2020. Spotify, on the other hand, promptly brought Kobalt into the fold as a third-party defendant, refuting Eight Mile’s underlying arguments but claiming that it (Kobalt) was liable for any infringement.
And on this front, at the case’s core are allegations that Spotify has since its launch failed to license north of 240 Eight Mile compositions, which have allegedly been exploited in many more recordings than that and racked up billions of cumulative streams.
As the plaintiff sees it, Spotify in allegedly rushing to launch (and tapping HFA for licensing assistance) didn’t obtain a pre-Music Modernization Act (MMA) direct license or Section 115 compulsory license for the works at hand — and also isn’t entitled to liability under the MMA.
Once again in the interest of relative brevity, this liability refers to MMA-created infringement protection for DSPs that took certain steps within a defined post-enactment window. Among said steps were providing comprehensive accountings of royalties and genuine efforts to match compositions to their rightful owners.
(HFA’s matching system was severely inadequate for some time, per Eight Mile. “HFA admits that it was not until 2019 that its system was fixed to be able to distinguish between those who have the right to administer and those who have the right to collect,” Eight Mile wrote in its memorandum in support of a motion for summary judgement.)
But Spotify — the alleged infringement of which “simply would not have been possible without HFA” — allegedly compelled the co-defendant “to serve invalid backdated” notices of intent to obtain a compulsory license. According to Eight Mile, that alleged move had major licensing implications before and after the MMA’s implementation owing to the hard pre-usage notice-of-intent (NOI) deadlines established by both systems.
“Under both pre- and post-MMA Acts,” Eight Mile spelled out, “failure to timely serve an NOI forecloses the possibility of a compulsory license, leaving the distributor as an infringer without a direct negotiated license.”
Moreover, Eight Mile, which is pushing for summary judgement against Spotify and HFA, has described at length the defendants’ alleged knowledge that it (and, via an admin pact, Bridgeport, which is auditing the Mechanical Licensing Collective), and not Kobalt, possesses the rights to the Eminem compositions in question.
(At issue as well in the highly complex courtroom confrontation is the constitutionality of the MMA – a point that’s prompted the Justice Department to weigh in on the same subject, filings show.)
Moving beyond the nuanced history behind this point and claims involving Kobalt’s alleged licensing of the compositions, the latter company is said to serve solely as Eight Mile’s “collection agent” in the States, not its administrator. And in sum, Eight Mile claims that the alleged deception caused it “to believe that a valid license was in place” for the use of the Eminem compositions.
“HFA historically only sent royalty statements when a valid license was in place,” reads text from one of the many filings submitted by Eight Mile Style. “The royalty statements therefore led publishers, including Eight Mile, to believe that a valid license was in place, they were being properly accounted to, and that they were bound by the statutory rate. HFA knew that none of this was true.”
HFA and Spotify are also pushing for summary judgement – motions that Eight Mile has opposed – and both sides have moved to strike various expert testimonies from the record. Furthermore, notwithstanding the new availability of legal documents in the case, the parties are continuing to submit fresh filings under seal.
Regarding where the marathon dispute goes from here, the presiding judge in a March 7th order scheduled an oral argument on the summary judgement motions for July 12.
