{"id":8864,"date":"2025-12-02T20:38:24","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T20:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/warner-music-sues-pacsun-for-tiktoks-with-ariana-grande-beyonce-songs\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T20:38:24","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T20:38:24","slug":"warner-music-sues-pacsun-for-tiktoks-with-ariana-grande-beyonce-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/warner-music-sues-pacsun-for-tiktoks-with-ariana-grande-beyonce-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Warner Music Sues PacSun for TikToks With Ariana Grande, Beyonc\u00e9 Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tWarner Music Group (WMG) has hit apparel company PacSun with a copyright infringement lawsuit for allegedly using unlicensed music in advertisements and influencer videos on TikTok and Instagram.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit, filed on Monday (Dec. 1) in California federal court, claims PacSun\u2019s social media pages have illegally used hundreds of unlicensed tracks by top artists like Cardi B, Ariana Grande, Beyonc\u00e9, Dua Lipa, Charli xcx and Bruno Mars. WMG owns rights to these songs via various label subsidiaries, including Atlantic Records and Warner Records, and its publishing arm, Warner Chappell Music.<\/p>\n

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\n\tAccording to the legal complaint, PacSun has invested heavily in social media marketing in recent years. WMG says the retailer has been \u201cwildly successful\u201d in selling apparel directly through posts on TikTok and Instagram, building up millions of followers and earning hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHowever, defendants achieved that success through their blatant, willful and repeated copyright infringement, including the infringement of at least 290 of plaintiffs\u2019 most popular and valuable sound recordings and musical compositions,\u201d write WMG\u2019s lawyers at Sidley Austin.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile individual social media users can soundtrack their videos for free with songs covered by blanket licenses, companies are required to buy so-called sync licenses for music in commercial advertisements. There has been a spate of lawsuits in recent years from the major record labels against brands that use unlicensed music on Instagram and TikTok, including Bang Energy, Chili\u2019s and Behr Paint.<\/p>\n

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\n\tLike those previous lawsuits, WMG alleges here that PacSun uses copyrighted music to soundtrack its social media ads without buying sync licenses. The lawsuit also accuses PacSun of paying influencers to do the same, citing TikTok videos of influencers lip-syncing to Jack Harlow\u2019s \u201cWHATS POPPIN\u201d and the Fleetwood Mac classic \u201cDreams\u201d while encouraging followers to buy PacSun products.<\/p>\n

\n\tWMG says it sent a cease-and-desist letter to PacSun back in February 2024, but to no avail: \u201cNot only did PacSun explicitly choose to ignore the demand, its infringement both continued unabated as to several of the works identified by plaintiffs and expanded to include new, additional infringements,\u201d reads the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow, WMG is seeking a court injunction to stop the alleged infringement, as well as financial damages. The music company says it\u2019s entitled to the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work, which would add up to a whopping $43.5 million for all 290 of the songs at issue.<\/p>\n

\n\tPacSun did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday (Dec. 2).<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
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Warner Music Group (WMG) has hit apparel company PacSun with a copyright infringement lawsuit for allegedly using unlicensed music in advertisements and influencer videos on TikTok and Instagram. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2402,1304,2403,593,7091,3790,479,1432,592],"class_list":["post-8864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-ariana","tag-beyonce","tag-grande","tag-music","tag-pacsun","tag-songs","tag-sues","tag-tiktoks","tag-warner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8864","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=8864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}