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28 June 2019Copyright

Spotify settles Four Seasons licensing dispute

Robert Guadio, a founding member of American soul band The Four Seasons, has settled his copyright lawsuit with Swedish streaming service Spotify.

Gaudio, along with Nashville-based music publishing company Bluewater Music Services, sued Spotify in July 2017, alleging that the licences authorising the Swedish company to stream the plaintiffs’ music on its platform had been terminated the previous year.

According to the suit, Spotify streamed many of the plaintiffs’ compositions without compensation or a licence.

“Spotify’s opaque and incomplete reporting makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to identify the extent of its infringement without access to Spotify’s internal systems and information,” the complaint said.

According to documents filed at the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee on Monday, June 24, however, the parties have now reached a settlement to bring an end to the litigation.

The joint filing by the parties said they expected a stipulation of dismissal to be filed within 60 days.

Terms of the settlement have not been disclosed.

Lawyers for the Four Seasons keyboardist and Bluewater had been scathing in their assessment of Spotify’s business model and its treatment of artists.

In the 2017 complaint, they said that “Spotify’s apparent business model from the outset was to commit wilful copyright infringement first, ask questions later, and try to settle on the cheap when inevitably sued”.

Elaborating on their criticism of Spotify, the plaintiffs said that Spotify had not put in place the proper infrastructure to obtain the data necessary to identify who was owed royalties for a specific composition.

The settlement marks the end of another major licensing suit brought against Spotify in recent years.

In December, WIPR  reported that music publishing company Wixen had settled its $1.6 billion suit against Spotify for unlicensed streaming of songs owned by Wixen.

While terms of the Wixen settlement were also confidential, in May last year, Spotify agreed to pay $43.5 million to end a class action suit brought by musicians David Lowery and Melissa Ferrick.

WIPR has contacted Spotify and lawyers for the plaintiffs for comment.

The problem of obtaining the required data to appropriately compensate copyright owners is a topic of debate in the music industry around the world.

Last week, WIPR  reported that the UK Intellectual Property Office had identified emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain as potential solutions in managing the ever-growing masses of data around musical compositions.

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20 June 2019   The UK Intellectual Property Office has said that emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain could provide crucial data management solutions for the music industry, but only after several underlying problems are addressed.
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21 December 2018   Spotify has settled a copyright infringement suit with independent music publisher Wixen.
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9 September 2020   The musical “Jersey Boys” doesn’t infringe the copyright for the autobiography of Four Seasons guitarist Tommy DeVito, a US court ruled yesterday, September 8.