Eminem’s publisher, Eight Mile Style has sued Spotify the popular music streaming service for copyright infringement as they apparently lack the licences for 243 of his songs. This includes some of Eminem’s most popular songs such as his Oscar-winning hit ‘lose yourself’.
Eight Mile Style is the Copyright owner for most of Marshall Mathers (Eminem’s) early work. This means they own the exclusive rights of copyright. Exclusive rights are listed in Section 106 of the United States Copyright Act. To exercise one of these exclusive rights you have to obtain a license from the copyright owner. If a company wanted to use a song, they would have to pay royalties to the licensor/copyright owner of the work otherwise, they would be infringing the copyright rights of the copyright owner.
Spotify is being sued for millions of dollars because it is claimed they have infringed the copyright of Eight Mile Compositions as Spotify have been allowing accessibility of unlicensed Eminem songs to users. Therefore, Spotify hasn’t been paying Eight Mile Style the royalties from the billions of streams the songs have accumulated on Spotify they have only given the company random payments which are a fraction of what the streams are worth.
Spotify has put songs like ‘Lose Yourself’ in something which they call ‘Copyright Control’ which is a category for songs where they don’t know who the copyright owner is so it cannot be licensed. Eight Mile claims that this is ridiculous especially for the song ‘Lose Yourself’ as it is one of Eminem’s most popular song and has received an Oscar. As well as this Eminem is currently the 37th most popular artist in the world with almost 32 million listeners per month on Spotify’s site so they should know who the publishers are for his songs.
Also, Eight Mile Style has alleged that the streaming company had not complied with the requirements of the Music Modernisation Act 2018 as they never licensed the compositions from Eight Mile and they haven’t taken reasonable effort to locate the copyright owner. They are also alleging that Spotify has undergone wilful copyright infringement to make a profit off of artists by not paying them the required amount of royalties. Eight Mile believes Spotify knew exactly who owned the songs and even if they did not know, they did not do what was required of them under the MMA as well as this the publisher is challenging the constitutionality of the act itself.
Eminem himself is not involved directly with the lawsuit but was apparently and understandably just as shocked as the publisher that his songs were unlicensed on the platform.
Written by Owen White, Third Year Law Student at Solent University
