Taylor Swift BOTS Case, Tupac Shakur Lawsuit, Spotify ‘Payola’ Ruling & More Top Music Law News
THE BIG STORY: Congress loves a “backronym” — awkwardly forcing certain words into the name of new legislation to create a catchy acronym. Want to call your sweeping new surveillance bill the USA PATRIOT Act? Easy peasy: just call it the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. What could go wrong?
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But such creative branding does not have the force of law — at least according to a new ruling last week on the federal BOTS (Better Online Ticket Sales) Act and Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.
The Federal Trade Commission sued ticket broker Key Investment Group LLC last year, claiming it had violated the statute by using “illegal means” to purchase more than 379,000 event tickets on Ticketmaster, including 2,280 for Swift’s record-shattering Eras concerts.
The BOTS Act, passed in 2016, was clearly named to riff on “bots” — automated crawlers that buy up tickets before real humans can do so. And in response to the FTC lawsuit, Key Investment argued that it had never used any such methods.
But in his ruling, the judge said bots were never actually mentioned in the law: “The statute unambiguously applies to ‘any person’ and not just to ‘bots,’” the judge said. “Courts have rejected relying on a statute’s name or acronym as evidence of the law’s plain meaning.”
You heard it here first: BOTS — it’s not just for bots.
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Other top stories this week…
–Tupac Shakur’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit seeking to uncover others involved in his 1996 murder — and the name of Sean “Diddy” Combs was mentioned 48 times.
-A London judge ruled against the estates of Jimi Hendrix’s bandmates in their long-running legal battle with Sony Music seeking royalties from the rock legend’s catalog.
-Ye (formerly Kanye West) kicked off a jury trial in a copyright lawsuit over “Hurricane” and “Moon,” two tracks off his Billboard 200 No. 1 album Donda in 2021.
-Spotify won a ruling rejecting a class action that claimed Discovery Mode is a “modern form of payola,” with a judge ruling that the dispute must be resolved via private arbitration.
-Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni reached a settlement to end their nasty legal war over the movie It Ends With Us, avoiding a trial that would likely have touched on Lively’s friendship with Taylor Swift.
–Britney Spears took a plea deal following her March DUI arrest, agreeing to plead guilty in return for a lesser misdemeanor “wet reckless” charge and a one-year probation sentence.
–Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler won a court ruling dismissing much of a lawsuit from a woman, Julia Misley, who says he sexually assaulted her as a minor.
–Jason Derulo took the witness stand to testify at a jury trial in a lawsuit filed by a session musician who claims he’s a co-writer of the 2020 chart-topper “Savage Love.”
–50 Cent is facing a lawsuit from a former executive at his company, who claims she was fired, threatened and harassed her after she refused to take part in illegal behavior.
–Busta Rhymes reached a settlement with an ex-assistant who claimed in a lawsuit that the rapper punched him in the face for using his cell phone on the job.
-Maverick City Music won a court order halting a competing Christian music project launched by estranged co-founder Tony Brown — at least for now.
-ABKCO Records reached a settlement with Behr Paint over an in Instagram advertisement that allegedly featured an unlicensed version of The Rolling Stones’ 1966 chart-topper “Paint It, Black.”
-An Austrian man accused of pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and plotting to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna nearly two years ago pleaded guilty as his trial began.
-Prosecutors revealed grisly new allegations against D4vd, claiming the singer stabbed 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez multiple times then dismembered her body using chainsaws.
–Chris Brown asked a judge to bar any reference to his infamous 2009 domestic assault of Rihanna during an upcoming trial over his housekeeper’s dog bite injuries.
