Sony Music Settles Class Action Lawsuit Filed By Recording Artists For Termination Rights

Sony Music has reached an agreement to settle a lawsuit filed by New York Dolls singer David Johansen and other artists in a bid to regain control of their teachers, ending years of class action lawsuits against major labels over ending copyright law properly.

The tentative agreement, announced in court documents last week, will resolve a case in which artists claimed Sony had unfairly dismissed their efforts to invoke the complaint — a federal law that is supposed to allow creators to regain control of works the decades after they sold them.

The exact terms of the settlement, which Sony lawyers called “an agreement in principle to settle all claims in this case,” were not disclosed. Neither side immediately responded to a request for comment on the deal.

Johansen, along with fellow artists John Lyon and Paul Collins, filed a lawsuit against Sony in 2019, claiming that the company had effectively refused to grant any termination requests from recording artists. The case, filed as a proposed class action meant to represent hundreds of others in a similar situation, was filed on the same day as a closely related case against Universal Music Group.

Taken together, the two lawsuits represented a sweeping critique of how the two music giants allegedly approached termination rights, which were created in the 1970s as a means of redressing the power imbalance between major entertainment companies and individual creators. In the case of the music business, if a musician sold the rights to a song that later became a hit, termination theoretically allows them to get those lucrative copyrights back decades later — between 35 and 56 years, depending on when the song was sold.

According to the lawsuits against Sony and UMG, the music companies had imposed a general rule that sound recordings (separate from the underlying musical compositions) were virtually never subject to termination. The labels reportedly argued that most of the recordings were “works for hire,” where the label simply hires artists to contribute to them. if true, that would mean inscription he was the rightful creator and the performers had no right to win back in the first place.

But the lawsuits were dealt a major blow last year when a federal judge ruled that the UMG case could not proceed as a class action. Although he noted that the artists “raise issues of fairness in copyright law that undoubtedly extend beyond their own complaints,” the judge said that each musician's circumstances were different, meaning that each would have to submit his own case against UMG.

This decision did not decide the merits of the case, but presented a serious logistical hurdle. Such lawsuits are extremely expensive, and artists typically do not have the same legal resources as major labels who have allegedly denied their termination requests. A class action would allow the artists to pool their resources and secure a sweeping judgment with a single set of legal fees.

After that decision – and the judge's subsequent rejection of the artists' efforts to appeal quickly – the two sides began to move toward a settlement. Singer of “Missing You”. John Waite, one of the artists who filed the case against UMG, settled in May. the remaining defendants in that case reached a settlement with UMG in December.

UMG's ruling was not directly binding on the lawsuit against Sony, which was being handled by a different judge in the same federal district court. However, the two cases were filed by the same lawyers and were largely identical, meaning that UMG's decision certainly didn't bode well for the chances of Sony's case being approved as a class action.

Before last week, Sony's case had long been on hold while the two sides worked on a settlement. In Friday's move announcing such a deal, Sony asked to extend that pause until May, giving it time to finalize the deal in writing and submit it to the judge. The request was approved Monday, bringing the case to a close this spring.

Attorneys for Sony and the plaintiffs did not return requests for comment Wednesday.