Lawsuit alleges Apple Music streams songs without proper license
A fresh lawsuit filed Wednesday claims Apple is in violation of the U.S. Copyright Act for streaming copyrighted music through Apple Music without first obtaining a license from the copyright owner.
Lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by plaintiff Pro Music Rights, the suit focuses on unpaid royalties and ongoing infringement related to 15 registered copyrights covering a clutch of songs.
PMR is a for-profit performing rights organization founded by Jake P. Noch, a 20-year-old "musical prodigy" who serves as the firm's sole member. With an estimated 7.4% marketshare, PMR has rights to license about two million works from top artists including A$AP Rocky, Wiz Khalifa, Pharrell, Young Jeezy, Juelz Santana, Lil Yachty, Soulja Boy, Nipsey Hussle, 2 Chainz, Migos, Gucci Mane and Fall Out Boy, among others.
According to PMR, Apple has streamed and continues to stream a selection of copyrighted music without entering into an agreement for payment of public performance royalties. Most of the named recordings were authored by Noch, though music from at least two other artists -- OG Maco and Lance Lee -- are listed as infringed. Relatively small catalogs from Noch's Sosa Entertainment and Brazy Records are also included in the claimed infringed material.
PMR in June 2018 sent a letter notifying Apple that it must acquire a license to publicly perform the protected music. Three months later, the Statutory Licensing Division of Music Reports, on behalf of Apple, replied in a letter stating the tech giant filed a notice of intent to obtain compulsory license. The company did not seek a license for public performances.
Subsequent attempts by Noch to strike a licensing and royalty agreement with Apple were rebuffed.
The lawsuit does not explain where or how Apple performed the copyrighted music publicly, suggesting only that streaming to customers of Apple Music counts as infringement.
PMR filed a similar copyright violation suit against Spotify in November, claiming the digital music giant owes some $1 billion for failure to pay royalties on more than 550,000,000 streams.
In its suit against Apple, PMR seeks all revenue associated with playback of the claimed infringed works, statutory damages of $150,000 per each act of infringement and court fees.
Lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by plaintiff Pro Music Rights, the suit focuses on unpaid royalties and ongoing infringement related to 15 registered copyrights covering a clutch of songs.
PMR is a for-profit performing rights organization founded by Jake P. Noch, a 20-year-old "musical prodigy" who serves as the firm's sole member. With an estimated 7.4% marketshare, PMR has rights to license about two million works from top artists including A$AP Rocky, Wiz Khalifa, Pharrell, Young Jeezy, Juelz Santana, Lil Yachty, Soulja Boy, Nipsey Hussle, 2 Chainz, Migos, Gucci Mane and Fall Out Boy, among others.
According to PMR, Apple has streamed and continues to stream a selection of copyrighted music without entering into an agreement for payment of public performance royalties. Most of the named recordings were authored by Noch, though music from at least two other artists -- OG Maco and Lance Lee -- are listed as infringed. Relatively small catalogs from Noch's Sosa Entertainment and Brazy Records are also included in the claimed infringed material.
PMR in June 2018 sent a letter notifying Apple that it must acquire a license to publicly perform the protected music. Three months later, the Statutory Licensing Division of Music Reports, on behalf of Apple, replied in a letter stating the tech giant filed a notice of intent to obtain compulsory license. The company did not seek a license for public performances.
Subsequent attempts by Noch to strike a licensing and royalty agreement with Apple were rebuffed.
The lawsuit does not explain where or how Apple performed the copyrighted music publicly, suggesting only that streaming to customers of Apple Music counts as infringement.
PMR filed a similar copyright violation suit against Spotify in November, claiming the digital music giant owes some $1 billion for failure to pay royalties on more than 550,000,000 streams.
In its suit against Apple, PMR seeks all revenue associated with playback of the claimed infringed works, statutory damages of $150,000 per each act of infringement and court fees.
Pro Music Rights Copyright Lawsuit by Mikey Campbell on Scribd
Comments
https://soundcloud.com/jakenoch
"Serves as the firm's sole member". What happened to President Paul Ring or Vice President of International Operations Livio Harris?
https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/us-based-public-performance-rights-organization-pro-music-rights-reaches-a-74-market-share-making-it-691001891.html Although neither ever confirmed they were actually involved in Jake's little fantasy operation.
"Relatively small catalogs from Noch's Sosa Entertainment and Brazy Records are also included in the claimed infringed material."
Please find some evidence that Brazy Records has ever released anything, because after extensive searches all I could find is it being listed as the writer for the 2 million auto-generated song titles by auto-generated artist names which make up the majority of the Pro Music Rights catalog.
The rights to use the recording for streams is cleared through Sound Exchange (although Apple might have an option of making a deal directly with the record label). As long as Apple is using Sound Exchange, they should be in the clear on that regard. The Publishing rights is another matter: if these songs are not part of the ASCAP, BMI or SESAC catalogs, Apple could have an unpaid obligation and even though this company sounds scuzzy, Apple cannot just skip out on paying publishing rights.
But this company does seem to be exaggerating value. Their lawsuit against Spotify is asking for close to $2 per stream. If only. Streams pay fractions of a penny, not dollars. On the Billboard charts, they count 1250 paid subscription streams or 3750 ad supported streams as 1 album equivalent which means a single song is the equivalent of about 104 paid subscription streams or 312 ad supported streams (assuming 12 tracks per album). If you assume that the retail value of a single is worth $3 and a typical publishing royalty is about 6%, each paid stream is worth about $0.001728 and each ad supported stream is worth about $0.000576 to a publisher. If half of the 550 million streams are paid and half are ad supported, that means Spotify would owe them $600K, which is a long way from $1 billion and that's if there were really 550 million streams.
Also, Apple can't use Sound Exchange to get recording rights for Apple Music because it's an interactive service. Sound Exchange administers Section 114 (and Section 112) statutory licenses. Those are compulsory licenses which certain kinds of services - e.g., digital radio stations and non-interactive streaming services - are allowed to use. There is no compulsory license for (recording rights for) what Apple Music does. Apple has to acquire recording rights from recording rights holders in order to use whatever songs it uses. That's part of why some music isn't available on Apple Music and, e.g., Spotify's paid service.
There is, of course, a statutory license for publishing rights which can be used even by interactive services like Apple Music.
I'd also like to clarify something else. PMR isn't suing Spotify just for unpaid royalties. The $1 billion figure which Bloomberg refers to (in the piece linked to in the OP) is for more than Spotify's supposed failure to pay PMR for the publishing rights it purports to hold. So the $2 per stream number isn't right. PMR actually suggests elsewhere that it should be getting $0.01 per stream. That rate is itself ridiculous because, among other reasons, the rate (for publishing rights) is already set (pursuant to Section 115) much lower.
Spotify's supposed infringement of PMR's copyrights isn't the primary focus of that Spotify suit. Only 1 out of the 6 causes of action listed in the complaint is about infringement. The complaint focuses more on other causes of action (e.g. unfair practices, tortious interference) which relate to Spotify having removed PMR's (it's really SOSA's) works from its service.
I doubt Apple Insider, in quoting from the complaint, meant to suggest that it agreed with that characterization.
Surely millions of plays on Spotify would be reflected by similar activity on other sites, but Sosa Entertainment's Instagram site managed to get a total of just 17 followers: https://www.instagram.com/sosaentertainment/ ; And here's the musical prodigy himself on YouTube with 425 views in two years: