You know, I think there might be a gap in the market for a daily e-bulletin just covering litigation involving the Jimi Hendrix estate, there seems to be so much of it. The latest Hendrix related legal news involves the long long running dispute between the Experience Hendrix company and music entrepreneur and record producer Ed Chalpin and his company PPX, many recent episodes of which we've reported on here in the Daily.
Recent court action by Experience Hendrix against Chalpin has been mainly concerned with enforcing past court rulings which the defendant has made a good job of ignoring. The Hendrix firm sued Chalpin's PPX company in 2001 through the UK High Court over the extent of Chalpin's ownership of a number of early Hendrix recordings, mainly from when he was an unknown backing guitarist for US band Curtis Knight & The Squires, and claiming the producer owed the estate royalties relating to those recordings.
Two years later the UK courts ruled in the Hendrix company's favour regarding the recordings, and ordered Chalpin and PPX to pay royalties stemming from them to the estate. A New York court upheld that ruling a year later, stating Chalpin owed the Experience Hendrix outfit some $725,868 in unpaid royalties. Nevertheless, neither Chalpin or PPX came forward with the money, and then last year, through another company, they attempted to auction off the recordings that were in dispute. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that auction was blocked by the courts, because of the outstanding dispute and unpaid royalties. All of which led to Chalpin being formally ruled as being in contempt of court back in February which, in turn, led to PPX finally coughing up the disputed monies last week - now up to $900,000 with interest.
In a press release confirming that a financial settlement had been finally reached, Experience Hendrix also revealed that the New York judge hearing the case, Judge Kaplan, rebutted complaints made by Chalpin through his lawyer that the Hendrix firm's action had had a detrimental effect on the value of his recordings. Kaplan reportedly stated that any loss of value in the recordings would stem from his actions, and not those of the Hendrix firm, observing that to say the Hendrix litigation had affected the value of his recordings was "like saying because you decided to hold an auction on the steps of the courthouse in which Mr Chalpin is going to sell the George Washington Bridge, the lack of bids would mean it has no value. The lack of bids would mean that somebody understands that the Port Authority owns it".