23 February 2024
Copyright (US) - Sony sues over alleged unpaid licence fees for songs used in the Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance With Somebody.
Sony Music has filed a lawsuit in California against four companies involved in making the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody over alleged unpaid music licence fees.
Sony claims the fees are due under a licence agreement it negotiated to cover the synchronisation, reproduction and performance of twenty-four of Whitney’s recordings in the film, including the worldwide hits, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, I Will Always Love You and How Will I Know.
A music synchronisation licence is a licence granted by the copyright holder of a particular song or composition which allows the licensee to play music at the same time as moving images or other forms of media output.
The four companies named as defendants in the lawsuit are Anthem Films, Nybo Productions, Black Label Media and WH Movie.
Sony alleges that Anthem entered into a licence agreement and access agreement with Sony on 5 December 2022, the fees were due to be paid by 17 July 2023 but that ‘…Anthem has failed to pay the fees owed to Sony Music under the agreements’ despite the film’s ‘…worldwide theatrical grosses having totalled over $59 million’ and additional income from ‘…home video sales and from a licence of the film to Netflix’.
According to the lawsuit, Anthem had asked Sony for extra time to pay the fees, saying it would do so after it had received a tax credit from the State of Massachusetts.
Sony claims Anthem never paid the fees, or any portion of the fees, that were due and so as a result, the use of the tracks in the film is now unauthorised.
Sony is seeking statutory damages up to the maximum provided by law, a declaration that the defendants have wilfully infringed their copyright and an injunction to stop the alleged copyright infringement.
In response to Sony’s lawsuit, Black Label Media has reportedly said that it was ‘one of many investors in this film, should not have been named in the lawsuit, and looks forward to being dismissed from it promptly’.
At the time zoom-in brief went to press, the other defendants had not responded.
Defamation - The Daily Mail seeks to strike out defamation claim brought by green energy industrialist Dale Vince
Associated Newspapers Limited, the publisher of the Daily Mail, has sought to strike out a defamation claim brought by a green energy industrialist called Dale Vince over an article it published in June 2023 with the headline “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex harassment’ donor.”
The article reported that the Labour Party was returning money to a donor who has been accused of sex harassment, but it also referred to Mr Vince, another Labour party donor.
The court heard the article contained two images of Mr Vince but the first few paragraphs of the article said the harassment allegations were about another donor.
The article had also been published online the previous evening with the words ‘sex pest’ in the headline, although it was amended 74 minutes later to change the photograph and the headline was amended the following day to match the print version.
While lawyers for Mr Vince acknowledged that the reader ‘would have realised by the end of paragraph four’ that he was not the alleged harasser and the article as a whole was not libellous, they argued that Mr Vince had been defamed by the headline, image and caption. They claimed that ‘Mr Vince has been very seriously defamed in the eyes of the substantial group of readers of this article, who confined their reading to the headline, the photographs and the captions of the photographs’ and ‘…it would be an affront to justice if he was not entitled to pursue his case.’
Associated’s lawyers said, ‘…it only takes two paragraphs to know’ that the alleged harasser is not the claimant. Associated is seeking to strike out the claim ‘on the basis that the words complained of, when read in their proper context – namely the whole of the article – do not bear and are not capable of bearing the meaning complained of.’
The case may consider the 1995 decision in the case of Charleston v News Group in which photographs of the faces of well-known actors from the soap opera Neighbours were superimposed onto a pornographic image with the headline ‘Strewth! What’s Harold up to with our Madge?’
In that case, the House of Lords held that a defamation claim could not be founded on a headline or photograph in isolation from the related text in the body of the article, and that when deciding whether an article was defamatory one had to consider the ordinary reasonable reader of the entire publication. In that case, it was clear that the depicted images were not real.
The court has reserved its judgment in the Daily Mail case. zoom-in brief will continue to follow the case over the coming months.
Copyright (Germany) - Court rules TikTok is liable for unlicensed content because it failed to make the ‘necessary best efforts’ to secure a licence from the copyright owner
A German court has found that TikTok is liable for hosting unlicensed content uploaded onto its platform by users because it has failed to make ‘the necessary best efforts’ to secure the licence from the relevant copyright owner.
The case was brought by a Berlin film distributor, Nikita Ventures, following changes made to the copyright safe harbour protections by the 2019 EU Copyright Directive.
The safe harbour protections protect internet companies from liability if users upload content to their servers in breach of copyright law. As long as a platform has a system to remove infringing content once made aware of the breach by a copyright owner via a takedown notice, the platform will not be liable for any infringement.
The safe harbour protections were not popular with music companies who believed that internet platforms were using them to negotiate favourable rates on licensing deals. It was amended by the Directive (Article 17) so that protection is now only available where a platform had made ‘best efforts’ to secure a licensing deal for uploaded third party content, has made efforts to block unauthorised content and acts expeditiously.
Although the final judgment has not yet been published, the German court appears to have held that TikTok fell under this new requirement and, because they had not used the necessary best efforts to seek permissions from the rights holders, they could not rely on the copyright safe harbour protections to avoid liability for infringement.
The UK has not implemented the changes that were in the Directive but has indicated that it is monitoring the situation in the EU and elsewhere, so it is possible that equivalent or similar legislation will be implemented here at some future date.
The case is interesting because it may prompt platforms to change the way they try to license content that is uploaded by their users without the necessary permissions.
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