Legal

Judge rejects Carly Simon’s Starbucks lawsuit

By | Published on Wednesday 21 April 2010

An LA judge has rejected the lawsuit launched by Carly Simon against coffee shifters Starbucks. As previously reported, Simon signed up to release an album via Starbucks’ short lived record company venture Hear Music. Alas her long player, ‘This Kind Of Love’, was released just as the coffee firm decided to bring the label project to an end, and she said that had a negative impact on the way her record was promoted.

With sales of the album somewhat disappointing, Simon accused the coffee firm of failing to fulfil its promises to market and promote the long player. She also said bosses at the coffee giant had misled her when negotiating her record deal because, she reckoned, they must have known the Hear Music venture was about to be scaled down, but they failed to share that information with her. She also argued that the coffee firm’s subsequent decision to discount her album in their own stores damaged her reputation. Starbucks refuted the allegations and said the main problem with the record release was that people just didn’t like the singer’s Brazilian-influenced fourteen track album.

Now LA District Court Judge George Wu has thrown the case out of court, saying the singer’s contract with Starbucks said little about their marketing obligations, and that the firm had no duty to reveal their future business plans as part of their negotiations with the singer. The judge added that while Simon may have been misled while doing her deal, it was her job to prove that was the case, and that she had failed to do so. In a summary judgement released this week he wrote: “The court views this as a problem of proof and not a problem of pleading”.

If Simon wants to continue with the case she will need to resubmit her lawsuit providing evidence she was misled by end of play today.



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