Sony, Google, Apple Hit With Lawsuits Over Pre-1972 Music
Eriq Gardner / Hollywood Reporter :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2015 suit is an early move in what becomes a decade-long campaign by the major labels to monetize pre-1972 recordings — a catalog slice that sits outside standard federal copyright frameworks and therefore outside the usual platform safe harbors. Sony's position is doubly exposed: it is a named defendant here while its recorded-music arm is simultaneously one of the most aggressive rights enforcers elsewhere.
The pattern set here repeats across the corpus: labels sue ISP Charter for profiting from repeat infringers in 2019 (the Charter case), then target the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project in 2023 as an "illegal record store" (the Internet Archive suit) — before the same majors pivot to settling and licensing with AI music startups like Udio and Suno in 2025.
First-order effects
- Google and Apple, whose services host or stream these older recordings, now face direct copyright exposure on a class of works that predates the federal statutory licenses they normally rely on to clear music at scale.
- Sony is squeezed from both sides of its business — defending as a distribution/platform entity in this suit while its own music division runs parallel enforcement actions against other intermediaries.
Second-order effects
- Every downstream distribution channel becomes a litigation target under the same theory: the labels' later suits against Charter over repeat infringers and against the Internet Archive over digitized 78s extend this playbook from streaming platforms to ISPs and archives.
- A Google win would matter beyond this docket — the related corpus shows Google prevailing against Genius in 2020 over scraped lyrics, suggesting platforms have routes to defeat label claims short of settlement.
Third-order effects
- If the arc holds, litigation functions as price discovery: each wave of suits against a new distribution technology ends not in the technology's elimination but in a negotiated license — as foreshadowed by the 2025 talks to settle the Udio and Suno cases through licensing agreements.
- The structural endpoint is that pre-1972 and legacy catalogs become a permanent royalty layer attached to every new playback medium, with the majors' legal departments acting as de facto rate-setters for emerging platforms.
The trend: Legacy music catalogs are being converted from legal gray zones into recurring licensing revenue, with each new distribution technology — streaming, ISPs, archives, AI models — triggering the same sequence of lawsuit then license.