Universal Music and Sony Music have teamed up to sue Musi, the rogue music app that was previously involved in a legal battle with Apple. In that earlier case it was Musi who went legal after Apple kicked it out of the App Store in September 2024.
Musi doesn’t have any licensing deals with the music industry and instead pulls in music from YouTube. It then places its own ads, and has built its own subscription product, around YouTube’s content.
The record industry is now officially referring to music services that employ this model as “parasitic apps” and is hoping that this lawsuit will discourage other companies from running unlicensed music services that piggy back on platforms like YouTube.
Commenting on the new lawsuit, Victoria Oakley, CEO of global record industry trade group IFPI, declares that “we are serving notice on parasitic apps, which are designed specifically to exploit artists and their music, and undermine legitimate music services”.
Musi and similar illegal services, she adds, have “no place in today’s music ecosystem which is built on the premise of empowering innovation through licensing”.
Although the Musi app remains unavailable on the Apple App Store, people who downloaded it prior to September 2024 can still use it, which is why it’s still a problem for the majors.
From a music industry perspective, Musi’s approach is obviously illegitimate and definitely infringes the copyrights in the songs and recordings that stream through the app. However, Musi usually counters that YouTube is already licensing the music and paying royalties to rightsholders and music creators, and therefore its service is legit, providing it complies with YouTube’s terms of service.
It was actually a complaint from YouTube that led to the Musi app being removed from the Apple App Store, strongly suggesting that the music app is not, in fact, compliant with YouTube’s terms of service. But Musi argued that Apple got YouTube to reactivate an old resolved complaint simply to give it an excuse to remove the app from its App Store in order to placate its buddies in the music industry.
As YouTube isn’t part of this case, it will be copyright law rather than YouTube terms in the spotlight when it comes to assessing Musi’s liabilities. And Canadian copyright law, as the lawsuit has been filed in Canada, presumably because that’s where Musi Inc is based.
Given that the impact of the landmark ruling in the majors v Cox Communications case is still being assessed when it comes to suing digital platforms involved in the distribution of unlicensed music - with that ruling potentially making it harder for copyright owners to enforce their rights against such platforms - Canada may well be a better jurisdiction for the majors to fight their Musi case.
As for the specific legal arguments under Canadian law, IFPI and its Canadian affiliate Music Canada says that Musi is “making copyright-protected sound recordings available to the public without authorisation” as well as “deliberately circumventing the technical protections put in place by YouTube in order to steal content from the service”.
Apple ultimately won its legal battle with Musi, mainly because its terms of service say it can remove apps from its App Store “at any time, with or without cause”. So while it denied the claims that it had colluded with the music industry to manufacture an excuse to axe Musi, that wasn’t really relevant, because Apple didn’t actually need an excuse.