James A. Rose

We've all heard a lot of talk (and you are reading blog posts from me) about the Orrin G. Hatch - Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act of 2018 ("MMA").  You perhaps know only what information I have published about rate appeals, Copyright Royalty Judges, and the Mechanical Licensing Collective.   But you DO know about your income from streaming services (and it probably is not much).  In an effort to help the real-life Nashville developing songwriter/recording artist, I set out to write this blog post to decipher the boilerplate contracts published on the TuneCore web site.  TuneCore is a site that smooths the path for creative people to sell music online, i.e. Spotify, iTunes, Tidal, and Google Play.   I printed the contracts and began to highlight contract points such as non-exclusivity, 100% of net income, statute of limitation for objecting to accounting statements, and responsibility for securing licenses from owners of musical composition copyrights.  

Or perhaps even (pun intended) "Dark Horse". Whatever side you take in this copyright infringement situation that seems to be trending in the direction of plaintiffs will be somewhat controversial.  In the Ninth federal Circuit, to state a claim for copyright infringement, a plaintiff must plausibly allege two things: Ownership of a valid copyright in the subject work Defendants copied protected aspects of the subject work's expression Malibu Textiles, Inc. vs. Label Lane International, Inc. , 922 F.3d 946, 951 (9th Cir. 2019) Some would say that there is no way a Christian rapper like Marcus Gray p/k/a Flame could make this happen against an artist like Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson p/k/a Katy Perry, associated songwriters, and Capitol Records, LLC. But following five years of pretrial litigation and seven days of proof, that is exactly what happened. "Joyful Noise" appears on the album Our World: Redeemed , which received a Grammy nomination fo