Eight Mile Style, Eminem’s publishing company, has filed a lawsuit against Spotify, late Thursday. The complaint claims that the streaming platform has no license for about 250 songs of Eminem. The lawsuit is a major copyright infringement.
The lawsuit also took to Music Modernisation Act which was enacted by federal law recently which improves the royalty payments made to songwriters. The suit which is filed in Nashville which claims that the music streaming app did not live up to the expectations of the Music Modernisation Act.
The complainant also claims that the work of Eminem has been streamed by Spotify millions of times, yet no sort of payment is done to them. Spotify has only remitted it which does not account for even the fraction of the payment.
The other claim says that the song, “Lose Yourself” is placed under the category of “Copyright Control”. Under this category, all the songs whose artists or singers are not known are placed.
Eight Mile called this “absurd” as Spotify couldn’t trace the copyright owner of “one of the most well-known songs in the history”.
The lawsuit reads that the streaming platform did not have any license to reproduce or distribute the Eight Mile Compositions, either direct, affiliate, or compulsory, but acted deceptively by pretending to have compulsory and/or other licenses.
The lawsuit further reads that even after the enactment of the Music Modernisation Act 2018, the music streaming platform failed to act and comply with its requirements.
This case of Eight Mile Style is taken up by Richard Bush. He is the same lawyer as in Marvin Gaye’s heirs in the “Blurred Lines” case.
The Music Modernisation Act was seen to be a victory by songwriters. Eminem aims to describe the weakness of the Act. The Act was passed after the US President Donald Trump had signed and approved it.
Comments from the officials of Spotify are still awaited.