In Eight Mile Style, LLC et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al., the rights management company for Eminem brought claims for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement against Meta in the Eastern District of Michigan.
In December of 2020, Meta entered an agreement with a licensing agency to allow users to add music to their content posts on stories, reels, and direct-message stickers through features and tools developed by Meta. Though Meta had attempted to negotiate with plaintiffs, they did not reach an agreement and plaintiffs did not grant the license.
Meta brought a motion to dismiss attacking plaintiffs’ lack of specificity, which it called “the who, what, when, where, and how.” The judge was “unpersuaded,” saying that while other types of claims require that kind of specificity, it is not required of copyright cases at the pleading stage. Since plaintiffs provided evidence of two songs that Meta had copied, and reasonably believed that 241 other songs had been copied to Meta’s servers, the claim for direct copyright infringement survived.
In contrast, the court found that plaintiffs alleged contributory infringement in a conclusory fashion. Plaintiffs had stated that Meta knew or should have known its users could easily engag in infringing conduct by using Meta’s tools. The court found plaintiffs failed to plead sufficient facts about Meta’s telling its customers to participate in copyright infringement; making the music available was not enough to maintain a claim of contributory infringement. Mere knowledge that the service is used to infringe is not sufficient, as we know from the Supreme Court’s decision in Cox. In their complaint, plaintiffs had not alleged that the tools were incapable of significant non-infringing use. Absent any evidence showing that Meta wanted users to use the tools for the purpose of infringement, the court said there were no plausible claims of contributory infringement.
Similarly, plaintiffs failed on vicarious liability. While they were able to prove the first prong (the right and ability to supervise), the court said they failed to allege Meta’s financial benefit from consumers’ infringing the songs. Plaintiffs offered no evidence that people used Facebook or Meta’s other platforms because of the availability of Eminem’s music. The court went on to disagree with plaintiffs’ theory that the availability of plaintiffs’ compositions on the Meta platform was a draw for customers. So, the court dismissed the vicarious liability claim as well.
One would think AI tools would have been able to find some more examples in which Meta customers had actually used Eight Mile’s content. In any event, it seems that after the Supreme Court’s decision in Cox v. Sony, almost any claim for contributory or vicarious liability is unlikely to survive a motion to dismiss. The good news for Eminem is he is already a successful artist, who successfully pleaded direct infringement, and with 243 songs that might be subject to statutory damages for copyright infringement (and intentional infringement, given Meta’s failure to negotiate a license), there’s still a potential win at the end of this litigation.
