Inside Mechanical Licensing Collective v. Spotify, the S.D.N.Y. dispute over whether adding audiobooks turns Premium into a royalty-discounted 'bundle' under the Section 115 compulsory mechanical license.
The Second Circuit held that ASCAP's consent decree forbids music publishers from selectively pulling their performance rights out of the collective for digital services like Pandora.
A Tennessee court found Spotify infringed Eminem's compositions by streaming them without mechanical licenses, then barred the claim entirely under equitable estoppel for the publisher's strategic delay.
How the D.C. Circuit vacated the Copyright Royalty Board's Phonorecords III streaming mechanical rate hike for inadequate notice and unexplained reasoning, and what the remand meant for songwriters.
