{"id":4050,"date":"2025-02-06T07:07:09","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T07:07:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/kendrick-lamar-super-bowl-spotify-lawsuit-ruling-more-music-law-news\/"},"modified":"2025-02-06T07:07:09","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T07:07:09","slug":"kendrick-lamar-super-bowl-spotify-lawsuit-ruling-more-music-law-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/kendrick-lamar-super-bowl-spotify-lawsuit-ruling-more-music-law-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl, Spotify Lawsuit Ruling & More Music Law News"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tThis is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tThis week: Experts weigh whether Kendrick Lamar can play \u201cNot Like Us\u201d during his Super Bowl halftime show amid Drake\u2019s defamation lawsuit; Spotify wins a ruling dismissing a lawsuit over streaming royalties; federal prosecutors file a superseding indictment against Sean \u201cDiddy\u201d Combs; and much more.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\t\tTHE BIG STORY: Can Kendrick Play \u2018Not Like Us\u2019 At The Super Bowl?<\/strong>\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tUnder normal circumstances, it\u2019s silly to even ask the question. Obviously <\/em>a Super Bowl halftime performer will play their chart-topping banger \u2014 a track that just swept record and song of the year at the Grammys and was arguably music\u2019s most significant song of the past year.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut these are very much not normal circumstances. Last month, Drake<\/a> sued Universal Music Group over Kendrick Lamar<\/a>\u2018s \u201cNot Like Us,\u201d claiming the label spread the song\u2019s \u201cmalicious narrative\u201d \u2014 namely, that Drake is a pedophile \u2014 despite knowing it was false.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat pending legal action makes it fair to wonder: When Lamar steps onto the world\u2019s biggest stage on Sunday night, will he face pressure to avoid the whole mess by just skipping \u201cNot Like Us\u201d entirely?<\/p>\n

\n\tTo answer that question, I turned to top legal experts \u2013 who told me that Drake probably won\u2019t win in court, but that corporate legal departments are also famously risk averse and might want to avoid trouble. For the full breakdown of how Sunday might go, read my entire story here.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tOther top stories this week\u2026<\/strong>\t<\/h3>\n

\n\tSPOTIFY BEATS \u2018BUNDLE\u2019 CASE<\/strong> \u2013 A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed against Spotify by the Mechanical Licensing Collective, rejecting the group\u2019s allegations that the streamer illegally slashed its music royalty rates. The lawsuit, filed last year, accused Spotify of bookmaking trickery \u2013 namely, claiming that the addition of audiobooks to the platform entitled the company to pay a lower \u201cbundled\u201d rate for music. But in her ruling, the judge said Spotify had done nothing wrong under \u201cunambiguous\u201d regulations \u2013 and that if anything, the company had paid too much in royalties.<\/p>\n

\n\tA.I. COPYRIGHT REPORT <\/strong>\u2013 The U.S. Copyright Office issued a long-awaited report on artificial intelligence. The report\u2019s overall message was hardly groundbreaking: only human authors are eligible for copyrights, but material created with the assistance of AI can qualify on a case-by-case basis. But it included key assurances for existing music industry practices \u2014 saying using AI as a \u201cbrainstorming tool\u201d to help write a song, or using it to assist in a recording studio session, would not automatically void copyright protection for the resulting songs.<\/p>\n

\n\tTERMINATION GOES GLOBAL?<\/strong> A Louisiana federal judge issued an unusual legal decision on copyright termination, breaking with existing precedents and handing a major win to songwriters and their heirs. Ruling on a dispute over the 1963 rock classic \u201cDouble Shot (Of My Baby\u2019s Love),\u201d the judge said that termination rules apply not just to American copyrights but also to the rights to a song around the world \u2013 an outcome that legal experts have said would represent a \u201cmajor upheaval\u201d and could \u201cradically revolutionize the way the music business runs.\u201d The losing party in the case, who has warned the decision will cause \u201cchaos,\u201d is almost certain to appeal the ruling.<\/p>\n

\n\tLYFT DISCRIMINATION CASE<\/strong> \u2013 A Detroit rapper named Dank Demoss (Dajua Blanding) filed a discrimination lawsuit against Lyft over allegations that one of the company\u2019s drivers told her she was \u201ctoo big\u201d for the backseat of his car and that \u201chis tires were not capable of supporting plaintiff\u2019s weight.\u201d In a viral video of the January incident, the driver can be heard telling Blanding that he\u2019s \u201cbeen in this situation before,\u201d and that she needs to order a pricier \u201cUber XL\u201d to accommodate her size.<\/p>\n

\n\tUPDATED DIDDY INDICTMENT<\/strong> \u2013 New York federal prosecutors filed a superseding indictment against Sean \u201cDiddy<\/a>\u201d Combs, adding additional victims and new allegations in the sprawling criminal case against him. Among the new claims: that he or his associates paid a $100,000 bribe to hotel staff to bury the now-infamous surveillance video of him assaulting his ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in 2016. Another civil lawsuit was also filed against Combs, the latest in a long list of such cases filed by Texas attorney Tony Buzbee<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4535,402,403,153,303,593,310,686,1217,2046],"class_list":["post-4050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-bowl","tag-kendrick","tag-lamar","tag-law","tag-lawsuit","tag-music","tag-news","tag-ruling","tag-spotify","tag-super"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050","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=4050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}