Pandora has been hit with a new lawsuit by a comedian who accuses the streamer of disparaging artists by failing to obtain the proper copyrights to stream their works – this time by Lewis Black† According to a complaint filed Thursday in California federal court, Pandora “used and exploited its works only to make money, knowing it was not licensed and had not and would not pay any royalties.”
The lawsuit is the latest in an escalating feud between streamers and comedians trying to change the landscape of compensation amid a boon in popularity for spoken word content. They are putting forward new licensing theories arguing that they should be paid for writing their jokes, just like musicians get royalties for composing lyrics.
The lawsuit filed by Black accuses Pandora of knowingly violating its obligation to secure proper copyrights. “Pandora did what most goliaths do: it decided to infringe now to ensure it had this highly valuable intellectual property on its platform to stay competitive and deal with the fallout later,” writes Richard Busch, a partner at King & Ballow representing Black. , in the complaint. “Later is now.”
Pandora admitted in financial filings to the Security and Exchange Commission from 2011 to 2017 that it risked losing its comedic content because it doesn’t have the proper licenses to stream the works, the lawsuit said. Pandora admitted it could “be subject to significant liability for copyright infringement and may no longer be able to operate under” [their] existing licensing system.” The concession was revoked after Pandora was acquired by SiriusXM in 2019.
“Mr. Black once famously joked in the wake of the Enron scandal: ‘You don’t want another Enron? This is your law: If a company can’t explain in one sentence what it’s doing, it’s illegal.’ The same applies here: if a company cannot explain in one sentence how it has a license to use copyrighted works, it is a copyright infringement,” the indictment reads.
Black is demanding more than $10 million over Pandora allegedly illegally streaming 68 of his works.
Pandora has maintained that the current compensation regime is legal under copyright law. In a counter-charge for alleged antitrust violations, it alleged that “Word Collections has consolidated its comedians’ naturally competing rights into a monopolistic portfolio and priced the only available license for those rights so that services have no alternative to his general license for his entire portfolio.”
Pieces of music are covered by two copyrights: one for the sound recording and another for the underlying written music. Streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify pay royalties to the owners of each copyright.
But for spoken word recordings, which include comic strip performances, streaming services only pay for the recording and not for the composition itself, in this case the comedy writing. Word Collection, which wants to position itself as a collection group for comics, similar to what ASCAP is for composers, is trying to change that. Her clients include the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlinwhich indicted Pandora in February†
One of the reasons spoken word artists are not compensated the way musicians are is that performing rights organizations such as BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC have existed since the 1930s to represent songwriters, while performing rights organizations for spoken word artists, such as Spoken Giants and Word Collection, have only existed since 2019.
“They shoot first and aim second — that’s the way tech companies work,” said Jeff Price, chief executive of Word Collections. “They get caught and pay the parking fine. They use their money to make it difficult and expensive for comedians to get paid.”
Price continued: “Comedians are looking for the companies that use their stuff to follow the law – license the copyrights and make the payments. No one is asking them to reinvent the wheel.”
Pandora and SiriusXM did not immediately respond to requests for comment.