Now, you know how we love to start the week with some good old litigation, so hurrah to this. EMI's publishing division have launched a $100 million lawsuit against one of the world's biggest ringtone suppliers, InfoSpace, alleging that the Bellevue based company has been underpaying royalties, selling ringtones in territories where they are not licenced to do so, and selling ringtones for songs that they have not licenced at all, including tracks like John Lennon's 'Imagine'. Ha, imagine that.
The lawsuit, filed at the New York District Court last week, also says Infospace "have engaged in a deliberate effort to frustrate and obstruct the audit rights held by plaintiffs pursuant to license agreements", adding that EMI Music Publishing was met with "diversion, obstruction, misdirection and misinformation" when they first attempted to audit InfoSpace revenues earned on songs they owned.
InfoSpace are yet to comment, though some elsewhere in the industry have expressed surprise at the lawsuit, with Billboard quoting Andrew McCormick of New York based Masur & Associates who observed: "InfoSpace is such a big company. They should have gotten all the rights they needed, and I'm surprised it has gotten to this point".
He added that recent moves in the US to introduce a compulsory licensing scheme, like that that operates in radio, into the ringtone domain might have been a motivating factor behind the litigation, with EMI looking for court authority to stress that despite those proposals it remains in control of its ringtone rights. McCormick: "Usually, these things are privately resolved, so there may be something deeper in this relationship that has caused this to come to litigation".