{"id":3029,"date":"2024-10-17T17:02:42","date_gmt":"2024-10-17T17:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/2-live-crew-wins-jury-verdict-to-take-back-catalog-rights-from-label\/"},"modified":"2024-10-17T17:02:42","modified_gmt":"2024-10-17T17:02:42","slug":"2-live-crew-wins-jury-verdict-to-take-back-catalog-rights-from-label","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/2-live-crew-wins-jury-verdict-to-take-back-catalog-rights-from-label\/","title":{"rendered":"2 Live Crew Wins Jury Verdict to Take Back Catalog Rights From Label"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tMembers of 2 Live Crew<\/a> have won a jury verdict allowing the hip hop legends to regain legal control of much of their catalog from a small record label that owned their copyrights for decades.<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter years of litigation, a Florida federal jury said Wednesday that Uncle Luke (Luther Campbell) and the heirs of Fresh Kid Ice (Christopher Wong Won) and Brother Marquis (Mark Ross) were entitled to invoke copyright law\u2019s \u201ctermination right\u201d \u2013 a provision that allows creators to take back their works decades after they sold them away to a company.<\/p>\n

\n\tAttorneys for Lil Joe Records, which bought the band\u2019s catalog out of bankruptcy in the 1990s, argued that termination didn\u2019t apply to 2 Live Crew\u2019s albums. Lawyers for Campbell and his late bandmates argued back that the right to terminate was \u201cinalienable\u201d and couldn\u2019t be forfeited.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Wednesday\u2019s verdict, the jurors sided with 2 Live Crew, finding the band members had lawfully regained control of the five albums at issue in the case \u2014 including their provocative 1989 record As Nasty as They Wanna Be<\/em>, which reached No. 29 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement to Billboard<\/em>, 2 Live\u2019s attorney Scott Alan Burroughs<\/strong> said he and his clients were \u201cextremely pleased\u201d with the outcome: \u201cOur team has fought this battle for nearly four years and are thankful to have had the opportunity to present our case to the jury and see justice served. The verdict was a total and overwhelming victory for our clients and artists everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, Richard Wolfe<\/strong>, lead counsel Lil Joe Records and label owner Joe Weinberger<\/strong>, vowed to appeal the verdict, saying it dealt with novel legal questions about the interplay between termination rights and federal bankruptcy law.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSince this is a matter of first impression \u2026\u00a0 which has never before been heard by any court, it may go to the Supreme Court,\u201d Wolfe told Billboard<\/em>. \u201cThe bankruptcy code is clear that all assets of a bankrupt party are part of the bankruptcy estate. All means all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe verdict was first reported by Law360<\/em><\/a> <\/em>and confirmed by Billboard<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n\t2 Live Crew, a pioneering hip hop group known for the backlash sparked by its sexually-explicit lyrics, is just the latest classic act to use the termination right, which typically kicks into action 35 years after a song was released.<\/p>\n

\n\tJay-Z has already invoked it to win back control of his debut album Reasonable Doubt<\/em>, a fact revealed during a recent legal dispute over Damon Dash\u2019s stake in Roc-A-Fella Records. Earlier this year, Cher won a legal battle with Sonny Bono\u2019s widow over whether termination trumped a decades-old divorce settlement. And before that, groups of artists filed class actions against Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, seeking to win back control of their masters en masse.<\/p>\n

\n\t2 Live\u2019s dispute kicked off in November 2020, when Campbell and other members notified Lil Joe that they planned to invoke termination and take back control of their music. Lil Joe and Weinberger had \u00a0purchased 2 Live Crew\u2019s catalog when the group\u2019s previous label, Luke Records Inc., went bankrupt in 1995. When the two sides could not come to terms, Lil Joe sued the members in federal court.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the case, the label argued that the bankruptcy sale, which had been signed by a judge, made clear that the album rights were \u201cfree and clear of any and all liens\u201d or other caveats. The company also argued the albums were created as \u201cworks for hire\u201d\u00a0\u2013 meaning Lil Joe had always been the legal owner of the copyrights, and there were no rights to 2 Live to take back in the first place.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut at the trial this month, 2 Live\u2019s attorneys told a different story. As reported by Law360, Burroughs argued the group had \u201ctrusted\u201d Weinberg but that he had \u201cbetrayed them and steered them into bankruptcy,\u201d where he was able to purchase the rights to their music on the cheap. He called the story a \u201ctale of deceit and dishonesty that wouldn\u2019t be out of place in a Netflix movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLil Joe can appeal the outcome, first by asking the judge to overturn the verdict and then by taking the case to a federal appeals court. Such proceedings could take months or even years, depending on how higher courts rule.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Members of 2 Live Crew have won a jury verdict allowing the hip hop legends to regain legal control of much of their catalog from a small record […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3030,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2571,3836,392,1548,344,408,395,882],"class_list":["post-3029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-catalog","tag-crew","tag-jury","tag-label","tag-live","tag-rights","tag-verdict","tag-wins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}