Eminem’s publisher sues Spotify over ‘copyright violation’

Eight Mile Style, Eminem’s music publisher, has filed a lawsuit against Spotify, Sweden-owned audio streaming platform, over alleged copyright infringement.

The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday before the federal court in Nashville, accuses Spotify of failing to get proper licenses for Eminem’s songs which have been streamed billions of times on the media services provider’s platform.

According to the court documents, Spotify is alleged to have reproduced ‘Lose Yourself’, Eminem’s 20o2 pop track, and over 200 of the rapper’s songs, thereby resulting to potential damages valued at billions of dollars.

It also alleged that Spotify categorized ‘Lose Yourself’ as a ‘Copyright Control’ song, a class reserved for tracks belonging to unknown artistes and remitted random payments which represented only a fraction for the rappers songs.

“Spotify acted deceptively by pretending to have compulsory and/or other licences. Spotify has not accounted to Eight Mile or paid Eight Mile for these streams but instead remitted random payments of some sort, which only purport to account for a fraction of those streams,” the court documents read.

Eight Mile Style is demanding about £30m damages for each of the “243 copyright-infringed songs”.

Their demand is on the back of the music modernization act (MMA) — a federal law enacted to modernize copyright-related issues for music on digital streaming platforms.

Richard Busch, a legal heavyweight, who has been behind multiple cases in music publishing and copyright, is the attorney representing Eight Mile Style for the lawsuit.