WENN
Eminem’s publishing company Eight Mile Style has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Spotify. The lawsuit is for a whopping $36.45 million and claims Spotify did not live up to obligations from the Music Modernization Act which was put in place to help songwriters with royalties from streaming services.
“Spotify has not accounted to Eight Mile or paid Eight Mile for these streams but instead remitted random payments of some sort, which only purport to account for a fraction of those streams,” the lawsuit claimed, via Variety.
The Music Modernization was put into place in 2018.
Per reports, one of the main reasons for the lawsuit is the “copyright theft” of Eminem’s hit song “Lose Yourself.”
The Hollywood Reporter adds:
As relief for alleged copyright infringement, Eight Mile seeks Spotify’s substantial profits, which the complaint painstakingly attempts to attribute to sweeping copyright theft of songs like “Lose Yourself.” (Universal, Sony, and Warner Music own big equity stakes in Spotify.) If the plaintiff runs into trouble demonstrating how Spotify has benefited from failing to secure licenses, the lawsuit seeks in the alternative the maximum amount of statutory damages — $150,000 for each of the 243 works at issue, which computes to $36.45 million.
“First, by its terms, the MMA liability limitation section only applies to compositions for which the copyright owner was not known, and to previously unmatched works (compositions not previously matched with sound recordings), and not to ‘matched’ works for which the DMP [Digital Music Provider] knew who the copyright owner was and just committed copyright infringement did not engage in the required commercially reasonable efforts to match sound recordings with the Eight Mile Compositions as required by the MMA.”
Eight Mile is being represented by Richard Busch, who previously won a $5.3 million lawsuit against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for infringing on the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s hit “Got to Give It Up.”
Spotify has not publicly commented on the matter.
