’s 2008 tune “In the Ayer” featured an unlicensed sample of “Jam the Box,” a 1984 track released by Pretty Tony that he owns.But five years later, Nealy’s lawsuit is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will use it as a vehicle to answer big unresolved questions about how much money can be awarded in copyright cases.
In the years since, the New York-centric U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has taken that language literally, ruling a copyright accuser cannot win damages for any for any conduct older than three years – full stop. If you wait to sue over a hit song from the 1990s, you cannot tap into those huge profits when you win the lawsuit.
That means the two courts that contain the vast majority of the country’s creative industries are directly divided over how copyright law works – a so-called “circuit split” that the Supreme Court is tasked with correcting.Nealy sued Atlantic Records, Warner Chappell and Artist Publishing Group in Florida federal court in 2018, arguing he had never actually granted them a valid license for his “Jam the Box” to be sampled in Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer,” which reached No.
“Deprived of a predictable limitations period and faced with expensive, time-consuming, and difficult litigation in order to defend years-old uses of copyrighted works, defendants will often be left with no choice but to settle claims early even in the absence of wrongdoing—or potentially never enter valuable agreements in the first place,” Shanmugam wrote for his client.ruling dropped in 2014, artists and labels saw a rash of long-delayed cases.
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