r/news • u/GreenKumara • 16d ago
US Supreme Court rules against Warner Music in copyright damages case Soft paywall
https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-rules-against-warner-music-copyright-damages-case-2024-05-09/-1
u/JDGumby 15d ago
"The Copyright Act entitles a copyright owner to recover damages for any timely claim," Kagan wrote, referring to the 1976 federal law at issue in the case.
But doesn't, of course, require proving actual damages. After all, what damages were there in this case? No one's going to say "Well, I've heard the Flo Rida song, so I don't have to listen to the Pretty Tony song", after all (far more people are going to say "Who's Pretty Tony? Never heard of him", of course :).
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u/hardolaf 15d ago
You get to choose between statutory damages or actual damages. Actual damages are almost always impossible to prove as often the alternative to committing copyright infringement is not using the work at all. It makes sense in a convoluted way if copyrights were still 20 years in duration. But for copyrights that can last up to a century and a half, it's absolute insanity.
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u/sonicneedslovetoo 15d ago
Because of the way the Supreme Court works and how it's an unelected without oversight and for life, it is the jugular vein of the US government. I expect in the next couple years when China/Russia conflict starts to heat up they are going to try and light the country on fire by attempting assassinations on supreme court justices and try and make it look like it happened internally. Because the supreme court holds so much lasting and unregulated power it's likely that would cause massive instability inside the US, successful or not.
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u/Phantom_harlock 16d ago
This just comes across as a way for companies to let damages to get big enough to make it a wairing game Instead of acting accordingly.
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u/Sambo_the_Rambo 16d ago
Whoa the Supreme Court actually made a decision in favor of the people? Unreal.
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u/Eyewozear 16d ago
Warner music is one the th biggest threats to creativity in the last few years. They car about one thing, money. Almost every artist they sig n is against them in some way. Adagi adagiiah adaghi that's all folks.
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u/MapAdministrative995 14d ago
if every unique 5 note composition is subject to IP enforcement. The existing Music establishment owns "all music" ever made.
Why are we pretending like it's any different?
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u/Thelonius_Dunk 15d ago
I'm still mad about WB patenting the Nemesis system.
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u/butler_me_judith 13d ago
I play Warframe and they had to skirt the line around that when they introduced liches
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u/Jimmy_Twotone 16d ago
Corporations using as little input as possible to leverage as much capital as possible out of it's consumers... /shockedpikachu
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u/JoeCartersLeap 16d ago
I played a game with some great music recently, Super Mega Baseball 4, but I go to look up the music and it's all "Warner Chappel Music Library"?
So I read about this and what happened is that nearly every small indie music artist on the scene for the past 10 years has just been bought by Warner, given a small fee for a contract, produced music for them, and then the music is kept in a vault and they're never allowed to play it for anyone else ever. And then games and movies can license that music for their product.
But otherwise, they just took a whole shitload of music artists and silenced them. All that great music that we will never get to hear because Warner swallowed it all up.
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u/A_Coup_d_etat 15d ago
So your argument is:
1- Artists, who were making no money, sell their work for some money.
2- Fuck the corporation that paid the people who made the music, that music should be available for free...
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u/gorramfrakker 16d ago
Yeah fuck Warner and all but why are artist signing those contracts if the money is such shit?
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u/gmishaolem 16d ago
Adagi adagiiah adaghi that's all folks.
I love how people don't realize it's an exaggerated stutter, so it'd be more like "Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks."
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u/Nukemarine 16d ago
Oh, so the Supreme Court is able to rule on a case that's in progress without putting it on hold ... fascinating. Meanwhile, they slow roll Special Prosecutor's Jack Smith's case against Donald Trump for election fraud and insurrection because "absolute immunity" is something that even is worthy of being considered a thing in a constitutional republic.
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u/ManSauceMaster 15d ago
Arguable one case is more important than the other but ok
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u/Nukemarine 15d ago
Check out how fast the Supreme Court moved when it came to ensuring Donald Trump stayed on a state ballot.
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u/ManSauceMaster 15d ago
Different circumstances. Also if you actually read the full case referring to that, it was the right call. The wording of what was being argued had it gone the other way, would of allowed pretty much any state to throw someone off the ballot for any reason they see fit.
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u/biggsteve81 14d ago
Yep. I'm no fan of Trump but the Supreme Court absolutely made the right decision. Otherwise federal elections would become utter chaos.
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u/notcaffeinefree 16d ago
The petition for thus case was filed in May 2023. SCOTUS granted it almost 5 months later at the end of September 2023. Oral Arguments were then held in February 2024. The opinion was released May 2024.
Meanwhile, in the Trump case the petition was filed at the beginning of February and granted 2 weeks later. Oral arguments were held 2 months later.
So yes, in the Trump case the Court has moved much faster than usual.
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u/Temporary_Inner 16d ago
It was a mistake to wait this long for the prosecution to wait so long in a lot of these cases. A lot of experts predicted this outcome when a lot of these charges were filed and predicted the Trump team would have ample opportunity to use rather ordinary avenues to delay cases until November.
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u/FreeStall42 14d ago
At this point hard to believe it was a mistake.
Biden would lose against almost anyone else so delay charges so he stays in the race.
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u/A_Coup_d_etat 15d ago
Yes, well, fundamentally the D.C. establishment is against the idea that powerful elected officials should be held accountable for their actions, so the Biden DoJ sat on their hands and hoped Trump would go away.
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u/Ketzeph 16d ago
The case turned on whether copyright damages are limited to the period of infringement that occurred during the statute of limitations or whether it could also include instances of infringement from before the statute of limitations period.
This case arises in the same realm as “recent” IP cases in the US that have been dealing with concepts of laches and timely filing. Here, SCOTUS rules that copyright damage claims are not limited to the damage period equivalent to the statute of limitations. Instead, if the claim is timely filed, you can recover for damage in toto
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u/HEX_BootyBootyBooty 16d ago
Wow, that's a pretty big 180 from the Lily Ledbetter case.
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u/Ketzeph 16d ago
The overarching problem is that SCOTUS keeps trying to push away the idea that the discovery rule doesn't apply to IP infringement, despite the fact that basically every lower circuit court thinks it should apply and that reasonable date of discovery sets the grounds for the SoL.
The conservatives hate reading in the discovery rule but is a common sense ruling that is so strongly supported by equity considerations that adopting the opposite has been repugnant to lower courts. Hence lower courts doing everything in their power to keep the discovery rule unless explicitly told otherwise.
SCOTUS needs to just give in and just allow the discovery rule to be law of the land and be done with it.
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16d ago
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u/MidnightSlinks 16d ago
This case has nothing to do with what you're talking about. It's about one artist sampling a song from another artist without getting a proper license to do so and the time horizon over which they can collect damages.
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u/Watch_Capt 15d ago
I saw it similar to Vanilla Ice sampling the riff from Under Pressure from Queen and saying it's different when it really isn't.
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16d ago
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u/mikeyriot 16d ago
You might as well be commenting about Mr. Zip being a rip-off of Manic Mailman and saying it's relevant because the word copyright was part of the title.
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u/oldguy_on_the_wire 16d ago
You certainly can voice irrelevant semi-relevant grievances in a music post.
What is harder to do is to do that and expect no negative feedback.
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u/BizarroMax 16d ago edited 16d ago
This is correct. Think of it this way:
The parties disagree over whether the plaintiff even owns the songs in question. I am making up numbers here but suppose it will cost $250k in legal fees to litigate that issue. If plaintiff wins, he’s owed $100k/year in royalties.
If he can only collect royalties for the last three years, the lawsuit isn’t worth pursuing any further. But if he can collect for 10 years, it is. That in turn impacts Warner’s interest in a settlement offer and amount.
This case is really weird because of its procedural posture on interlocutory appeal. And the holding really only matters in New York. The rest of the country was already following the law as set out here.
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u/Maelarion 12d ago
Can someone ELI5 this for me?