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1: Yellowcard Sues Juice WRLD Over ‘Lucid Dreams,’
First off today, Halle Kiefer at Vulture reports that the now-defunct band Yellowcard has filed a lawsuit against Juice WRLD alleging that Juice WRLD lifted elements of their 2006 song Holly Wood Died for his 2018 hit Lucid Dreams.
According to the lawsuit, Juice WRLD professed his love for Fall Out Boy’s album From Under the Cork Tree, which shares a producer with Yellowcard’s 2006 album Lights and Sounds, which featured Holly Wood Died. They claim that the appreciation for Fall Out Boy led Juice WRLD to check out their work and ultimately reuse elements, including melodies, in his new work.
Yellowcard is seeking $15 million in damages as well as an ongoing ownership stake in the song. However, in an interesting layer, most of the royalties for Lucid Dreams goes to the musician Sting, who is sampled in the track (with his permission). It is unclear if and how that will impact the case.
2: BREIN, MPA, and ACE Shut Down Massive ‘Pirate CDN’
Next up today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that anti-piracy groups BREIN, MPA and ACE have collaborated to take down Moonwalk, a content delivery network that served an estimated 80% of Russian streaming sites.
The system contained some 26,000 movies and more than 10,000 TV shows and were paying websites that offered to stream those films some $.60 per 1000 streams. However, the service was headquartered in the Netherlands, meaning that local authorities struggled to shut it down.
However, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, along with the MPA and ACE, have secured court orders that are requiring local hosting companies to shutter the service. Moonwalk says on its site that the service will “never be up again”, seemingly bringing the service to a final close.
3: Chuck D Brings Publishing Lawsuit to Federal Court, Claims He Was Cheated Out of Royalties
Finally today, Claudia Rosenbaum reports that Chuck D, best known as a member of Public Enemy, has filed a lawsuit against the music publisher Reach Global Music alleging that the company has used false registrations as part of a scheme to obtain ownership interests in songs written by him.
Chuck D, real name Charlton Ridenhour, alleged that the scheme goes back as far as 2001 when Ridenhour and Michael Closter, the head of Reach Global Music, created Terrordome Music Publishing as a means of administering compositions Ridenhour had recently reacquired from Def Jam. However, he claims that Terrordome actually acquired the copyrights in the compositions rather than just functioning as a publisher so that more money could be funneled into Closter and Reach Global Music as Reach had a 42% stake in Terrordome.
Closter, for his part, claims that the lawsuit was frivolous and notes that Ridenhour did not sue Terrordome, his own company and the one that supposedly filed the false registrations. He claims that all of this was agreed upon when the company was formed and
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