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Spotify Hit With $1.6 Billion Copyright Lawsuit (spin.com)
The Wixen Music Publishing company, which administers song compositions by Tom Petty, Dan Auerbach, Rivers Cuomo, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, and others, has hit Spotify with a copyright lawsuit seeking $1.6 billion in damages. The publishing company filed the lawsuit on December 29, alleging the streaming giant is using Petty's "Free Fallin" and tens of thousands of other songs without license or compensation. SPIN reports: Back in September, Wixen objected to a $43 million settlement Spotify had arranged over another class action lawsuit brought by David Lowery (of Cracker and Camper van Beethoven) and Melissa Ferrick, stating it was "procedurally and substantively unfair to Settlement Class Members because it prevents meaningful participation by rights holders and offers them an unfair dollar amount in light of Spotify's ongoing, willful copyright infringement of their works." A judge has yet to rule on that settlement, and in the meantime, Wixen has moved to file its own lawsuit, which purports "as much as 21 percent of the 30 million songs on Spotify are unlicensed," according to The Hollywood Reporter.
"Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement," the complaint reads. "Wixen notified Spotify that it had neither obtained a direct or compulsory mechanical license for the use of the Works. For these reasons and the foregoing, Wixen is entitled to the maximum statutory relief."
"Spotify brazenly disregards United States Copyright law and has committed willful, ongoing copyright infringement," the complaint reads. "Wixen notified Spotify that it had neither obtained a direct or compulsory mechanical license for the use of the Works. For these reasons and the foregoing, Wixen is entitled to the maximum statutory relief."
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If you listened to these artists while you did anything, their reasoning is that you not only owe them for the music, but you also owe them for what you did while listening to them. They set your brain waves straight!
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Born on the run
I'm pretty ambivalent towards this (not really a big music fan). But the way I see it, as long as the music industry is trying sell you a product that they are not paying for, then it seems to me that turnabout is fair play.
The copyright bargain is that content creators get a temporary copyright on their work in order to stoke a permanent increase in the rate at which such works enter the public domain (by incentivizing the creation of such works and thus increasing the rate at which they're created). i.e. The payment for their right to sell to you their works, is that those works must eventually be introduced into the public domain. If those content creators finagle the law so their works are no longer entering the public domain, or that it takes so long for said works to enter the public domain that they have no value by the time that happens (1897's greatest hits anyone?), then they themselves have broken the copyright bargain. And as such their copyright protections are forfeit.
Contract law 101. Both parties to the contract must give up something of value to each other in the exchange. If only one side is giving something up, then the contract is not binding, and thus invalid, and there is no copyright protection.