Canada-based music streaming platform Musi has sued Apple in California federal court just a week after the Big Tech giant removed the Musi app from its Apple App Store on the basis of infringement claims.
Jennifer A. Golinveaux and Samantha K. Looker, attorneys at Winston & Strawn’s San Francisco office, filed a complaint on behalf of Musi on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. The suit alleged breach of contract and breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
The case was assigned to Magistrate Judge Nathanael M. Cousins on Thursday. Counsel has not yet appeared for the defendant.
Musi. whose headquarters in the province of Manitoba, is an app that gives users the ability to bypass paying for similar services from subscription-based rivals like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music by allowing them to stream any song uploaded to YouTube for free. The app provides the option to listen to “audio-only” versions of music videos from YouTube’s catalogue and continues to play in the background, unlike videos played directly on YouTube, when the user exits the app.
According to the complaint, Apple unexpectedly deleted the app from its app store on Sept. 24 in response to “a five-word complaint dated July 29, 2024 from a complainant identified as ‘YouTube Legal.'”
Musi claimed that it has been in communication with YouTube since at least 2015 and that it had addressed several of the company’s concerns about the app’s compliance with its terms of service in discussions held between April and May 2021.
YouTube later sent notices to Apple accusing Musi of “[violating] its intellectual property rights” in March 2023 and July 2024. Musi’s repeated efforts to contact YouTube in the interim, it said, were met with radio silence and correspondence sent to YouTube requesting clarification on Sept. 6 went answered, it said.
The complaint states that Musi’s counsel sent an update to Apple on Sept. 24 explaining that YouTube had not responded to any of its attempts to establish contact. On the same day, Apple informed Musi that it was moving to strike the Musi app from its App store “on the basis of intellectual property infringement.”
“Apple’s decision to abruptly and arbitrarily remove the Musi app from the App Store without any indication whatsoever from the Complainant as to how Musi’s app infringed Complaint’s intellectual property or violated its Terms of Service, and in light of the fact that Musi has continued to operate the Musi app in a substantially similar matter since May 2021, was unreasonable, lacked good cause, and violated Apple’s Development Agreement’s terms,” wrote attorneys for the plaintiff.
According to the claim, Apple breached the terms of its own development agreement by terminating downloads of the Musi app without a “reasonable basis” for believing that the app infringed on YouTube’s intellectual property. Musi is seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction to reinstate the app to the Apple app store; direct, actual, compensatory and/or consequential damages; and prejudgment interest.
Apple and Musi’s counsel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.