Why Are There So Many Pop Music Lawsuits

If you follow copyright news, you likely have been seeing countless stories of  popular musicians being sued for alleged copyright infringement in their work. 

Dua Lipa has been sued twice over her sling Levitating. Drake has been sued over his songs In My Feelings and Nice for What. Finally, Normani and Sam Smith are being sued over their duet Dancing with a Stranger.  

All four of these cases were filed just in the past week.

That says nothing about the myriad of cases over the past few months or years that have been grabbing headlines, both inside and outside copyright circles.

To be clear, lawsuits over hit songs have been a thing for as long as there have been hit songs. The Beach Boys, for example, were sued by Chuck Berry’s publisher in 1963 over Surfin’ USA. Pretty much every decade in music history has had their copyright battles.

However, those lawsuits definitely seem to be coming much more quickly. Four headline-grabbing lawsuits in one week may be a fluke, but it is an indicator of a a growing issue for many in the music industry.

To that end, it’s a trend that has been going on for some time now. Back in 2020, Rolling Stone reported that the sharp rise in such cases was causing songwriters to pick up insurance against such lawsuits.

But all of this begs a question: What is going on? Why is there a sudden increase in the number of lawsuits over popular music?

The answer can easily be traced back to 2015 and a singular case.

Blurred Times Still Remain

Back in March 2015 a jury handed down a $7.4 million judgment in the Blurred Lines case. The case saw the estate of Marvin Gaye filing a lawsuit against Robin Thicke and others involved in the song Blurred Lines, alleging that the song was an infringement of Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit song Got to Give it Up

Though reduced to $5.3 million, the verdict and the damages survived an appeal and closed as a major loss for the defendants.

As we discussed back in 2019, the case itself didn’t have a significant impact on the legal landscape of copyright. The case was heavily fact-specific, and applying it to other cases would be difficult. 

This was a notion further supported in 2020 when the band Led Zeppelin emerged victorious in their lawsuit against the band Spirit, a decision that was quickly used to overturn another controversial court ruling involving the Katy Perry song Dark Horse

As we discussed in early 2020, the idea of the Blurred Lines case being some form of legal ground shift should be buried. However, it’s clear that both plaintiffs and their lawyers remain emboldened. 

The reason may well be an issue of timing.

Interesting Timing

When looking at the three songs from this past week, a pattern quickly emerges. In My Feelings and Nice for What were both released in early-to-mid 2018, Dancing with a Stranger was released in January 2019 and Levitating in March 2020.

In short, the newest song is already two years old. Some of this is simply because it takes time for a copyright infringement lawsuit to be filed. Simply put, it takes time to discover a suspected infringement, find a lawyer and then draft a case. Furthermore, the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years after the infringement is discovered. As such, there’s little motivation to hurry.

Another element is the pandemic, which put a hold on a great deal of litigation. Cases that may have been filed during the peak pandemic months were pushed back for when courts could more fully reopen.

As a result, a lot of these cases were likely being considered or otherwise in the works before the Supreme Court the Supreme Court declined to hear the Led Zeppelin case in October 2020, bringing that case to an end. Though the ruling didn’t stop them from being filed, these cases likely began life before those decisions were handed down.

This is especially interesting as three of the four lawsuits (the two against Dua Lipa and the one against Sam Smith and Normani) were all filed California, placing them in the Ninth Circuit. That was the same circuit that ruled so strongly in the Led Zeppelin case.

These cases may very well become major tests of how the courts rule on these cases post-Led Zeppelin. As such, they may finally bring some serious clarity to an area of the law that, rightly or wrongly, has become quite chaotic over the past seven years. 

Bottom Line

In the end, these four lawsuits are, mathematically speaking, long shots. The number of these types of lawsuits that are filed towers over the number that succeed. Some, such as the first lawsuit against Dua Lipa, already have teardowns pointing to key weaknesses in the case

But that doesn’t stop would-be plaintiffs or their lawyers from trying. After all, most cases don’t make it to a trial or a judgment, and even a modestly favorable settlement could be very lucrative. 

Though the Blurred Lines case wasn’t a major shift in copyright law, it was a major shift in the way people thought about copyright law. Plaintiffs were emboldened, defendants were intimidated. This has persisted even after new rulings have sought to clarify and expand upon the Blurred Lines case.

The truth is that the Blurred Lines case was so prevalent in the news cycle and so important to musicians, that it will take far more than a few defeats to push it out of mind. Combine that with the fact that music is inherently complicated and difficult to interpret, you have an environment where plaintiffs have little to lose by rolling the dice.

For those hoping for fewer such lawsuits, the only hope is more clarity and more certainty. Once the boundaries are more clearly understood, it will be more difficult for plaintiffs to justify lawsuits that aren’t perfectly clear.

That, in turn, may be what one or more of these cases helps provide. 

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