After five years, the legal battle between Spotify and Eminem‘s publishing company Eight Mile Style has concluded — and that’s to a legal loophole, the streaming giant has been let off the hook.
In 2019, Eight Mile Style sued Spotify, accusing the service of acting “deceptively” by pretending to have the proper licenses to stream more than 240 songs from the rapper’s catalog. Only a portion of the music falls under the rights ownership of the publisher, which utilizes Kobalt Music Group as a royalty collection agency. In the suit, Eight Mile Style sought nearly $40 million, claiming to not have received payment for billions of Spotify streams.
This week, a judge in Tennessee ruled that while Spotify did not in fact have a license to stream the hundreds of relevant Eminem songs, the streaming service is not liable for the lost royalty payments. The decision is connected to Spotify’s initial response to the lawsuit, which it submitted in 2020, which stated that Kobalt Music Group was at fault. The service stated that it had been licensed by the collection agency to “reproduce and distribute the compositions,” according to a third-party complaint.
The Tennessee judge, Aleta A. Trauger, sided with the decision that even if Spotify were to have been found guilty of streaming Eminem’s catalog without the proper license to do so, any imposed penalties would have fallen on Kobalt Music Group for not collecting the royalties on behalf of Eight Mile Style.
“While Spotify’s handling of composer copyrights appears to have been seriously flawed, any right to recover damages based on those flaws belongs to those innocent rights holders who were genuinely harmed,” Judge Trauter stated, according to Music Business Worldwide. “Not ones who, like Eight Mile Style, had every opportunity to set things right and simply chose not to do so for no apparent reason, other than that being the victim of infringement pays better than being an ordinary licensor.”
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It was ruled that, with Spotify determined not to be liable for any damages, Kobalt will likely be responsible for covering certain attorney’s fees and expenses for the five-year-old suit.
Representatives for Spotify and Eminem did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
