Majors file a lawsuit against Pandora on pre-1972 recordings

Majors file a lawsuit against Pandora on pre-1972 recordings


The question of pre-1972 recordings used to be a little-known small print issue but it has come to the fore in the past couple of years due to the boom of internet radio services.

The Copyright Act in fact establishes Federal protection for all the master recordings created after February 15th 1972, leaving the works created before that in a legal grey area. Services like Pandora have so far chosen to only pay royalties to SoundExchange for those works that are strictly mandated by the law - the post-1972 ones - but rights owners are fighting back. Their argument is that even if the master recordings are not protected on a Federal level they are still protected by State law, so services should still be seeking to license them.

The CEO of SoundExchange estimated that pre-1972 recordings would have received over $60 million in royalties during 2013 if they had been properly licensed. Now labels have decided to take action and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Pandora in a New York state court. The suit was filed by Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music alongside the RIAA and ABKCO.

In 2013 the band The Turtles had already started a class-action lawsuit against SiriusXM claiming that the service was at fault for not paying royalties on their tracks which were released before 1972.

To complicate matters further, because even small changes in the original master recording can lead to the owner filing for a new copyright - which would then fall in the post-1972 period - many labels are filing their older catalogue as “remastered” or in some way manipulated from the original and thus present it as new copyright. This is a problem in itself as services are questioning whether anything was done at all to qualify them for the new copyright status and so courts are having to resort to spectrographic analysis and opinion of experts on the matter.

(Andrea Leonelli)