Less Than Five Months Later, Sony Music Voluntarily Dismisses Its Marriott Copyright Lawsuit With Prejudice
The Warsaw Marriott Hotel. Photo Credit: Michal Mrozek
Just shy of five months after it kicked off, the copyright infringement battle between Sony Music Entertainment (SME) and Marriott International has officially drawn to a close.
That abrupt conclusion arrived in the form of a notice of dismissal with prejudice from the major label, which had accused Marriott of infringing on a variety of recordings in social-media videos. In general – and as a number of companies are finding out the hard way – platforms’ licensed song libraries are cleared only for personal, not commercial, use.
But several promotion-minded brands have allegedly failed to obtain the required licenses, with Sony Music having specifically accused the “behemoth of the hospitality industry” Marriott of “at least 931 infringements” in the U.S.
While the lion’s share of the alleged infringement referred to videos uploaded directly to the defendant’s social handles, Marriott also used protected music without authorization in paid influencer campaigns, SME maintained.
Predictably, given the scope of the multi-year alleged infringement, Sony Music claimed that warnings and allegedly unfulfilled “tolling agreements” had failed to produce a satisfactory resolution.
Now, said resolution has evidently arrived – though the involved parties have opted against publicly disclosing the precise terms at hand. However, it appears that Marriott is being careful about the music featured in social content. The company’s latest Instagram videos encompass “original audio” that looks to have released on DSPs not long before the posts themselves went live, for instance.
Bigger picture, the dismissed Sony Music-Marriott suit certainly doesn’t mark the end of legal actions over brands’ alleged infringement on social media.
Over the summer, the Beastie Boys sued Chili’s parent company Brinker International over the alleged unauthorized incorporation of “Sabotage” into a social-media campaign. This case is slowly but surely chugging along, the docket shows, with Brinker having waived the service of the summons at the top of October.
Bringing the focus back to Sony Music, we’re weeks out from the one-year anniversary of the separate social-media-infringement suit it filed against OFRA Cosmetics.
Contrasting the shelved Marriott dispute, this older courtroom confrontation is in full swing, complete with an ongoing discovery process (the court has entered a confidentiality order as well) and a seemingly sweeping subpoena for pertinent materials from OFRA co-founder Ofra Gaito.
These materials pertain to OFRA’s funding history, ownership status, communications and documents concerning the brand’s social videos, and a whole lot else, according to a cursory look at the lengthy subpoena itself.
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