Sony Music Entertainment settles years-long class-action lawsuit with New York Dolls’ David Johansen and more

Sony Music Entertainment has settled a years-long class-action lawsuit with the likes of New York Dolls’ David Johansen, John Lyon and more.

The lawsuit was in an effort to regain control of the artists’ masters, and has finally come to a settlement after years of closely-watched class-action litigation against major record labels over copyright law’s termination right.

Announced in court papers last week, the agreement between the music label and the musicians will resolve a case which saw artists accuse Sony of unfairly rejecting their efforts to invoke termination – a federal law that’s supposed to let authors take back control of their works decades after they sold them away.

Per Reuters, Johansen, Lyon and Paul Collins sued Sony Music back in 2019, accusing the label of barring their termination notices for their music and proceeding to sell it without permission. The case had ben on pause for settlement since 2021.

The musicians based their claims off of a part of the Copyrights Act. Section 203 of the Copyrights Act “permits authors (or, if the authors are not alive, their surviving spouses, children or grandchildren, or executors, administrators, personal representatives or trustees) to terminate grants of copyright assignments and licenses that were made on or after January 1, 1978 when certain conditions have been met.”

Per Pitchfork, they alleged that Sony Music Entertainment was engaging in copyright infringement by refusing “to allow any recording artist to take over control of the sound recordings or enter into an agreement with a different label for the exploitation of recordings, after the effective date of termination.”

Details of the settlement were not disclosed, but attorneys for Sony called it “an agreement in principle to settle all claims in this case.” Neither side immediately returned request for comment on the agreement (per Billboard).

The lengthy lawsuit was aimed to represent a plethora of other artists and musician who were in a similar position and was placed the same day as another related case against Universal Music Group.

In other news, TikTok has recently confirmed that it has begun to remove Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) songs from its platform.

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