By Dan Satherley
The 'big four' music labels – Sony, Warner, EMI and Universal – have been targeted in a CAN$60 billion class-action lawsuit in Canada.
The plaintiffs, led by the estate of jazz legend Chet Baker, claim the Canadian divisions of the big four have for decades failed to pay for the rights to use their music on compilation CDs and live releases.
The labels have for the past two decades released albums without obtaining the appropriate copyright licenses.
"Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a 'pending list', which signifies that approval and payment is pending," reports the Toronto Star's Michael Geist.
"It is perhaps better characterised as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee."
The list allegedly now contains over 300,000 songs, and the big four are yet to pay the copyright owners for additions made to the list as far back as the late 1980s. The Canadian Recording Industry Association, the lobby group which represents the labels, admits it owes at least CAN$50 million, but at CAN$20,000 a track – the going rate for copyright infringement in Canada – the potential liability for the industry is astronomical.
In recent months a 32-year-old mother-of-four in the US was fined almost US$2 million for infringing copyright by sharing 24 songs on the internet, and a US grad student was also fined, US$675,000, for sharing 30 songs.
3 News