Is it possible to feel nostalgic over a lawsuit? To read through the various legal demands, accusations of false dealing, general anger-tinged footnotes and citations, and think, “Oh, I remember what it was like when this all happened before, when the world was fresh and young”?
These thoughts brought to you by news that Sony has once again sued online music company Napster, dragging us all back to those heady early internet days of 1999. Back then, of course, Napster was positioned as a true existential threat to the music industry, allowing online users to freely pass around MP3s of songs that, in upwards of 10 percent of cases, were properly labeled with all the correct artists attached to them. (Ah, the joys of downloading a “Weird Al” song you’d never heard of before, only to be treated to some of the vilest, dumbest also-ran parody songs of all time.) Sony was one of just several companies that essentially sued the original incarnation of Napster straight out of existence, leaving nothing behind but a smear, a halfway-decent Justin Timberlake performance in The Social Network, and a name that’s been passed around by a shockingly large number of hucksters-of-the-day since.
This current lawsuit is a bit more prosaic, admittedly: Sony is claiming that Napster—which rebranded itself as a streaming service when it came back to life in the 2010s—has been failing to pay music royalties to the publisher. For some time, in fact, to the point that Sony put the company on a payment plan a few months back to try to pay back the nearly $10 million in royalties that Napster allegedly owes them. Parent company Rhapsody International apparently managed to make exactly zero of those payments—while Napster continued to serve up Sony-owned music to its users—and so they’ve now been hit with a lawsuit seeking $9.2 million in unpaid royalties, and potentially as much as $36 million in copyright infringement damages.
The case comes just a few months after Napster got bought yet again, this time by a company with the completely benign-sounding name Infinite Reality. The company crammed as many modern tech buzzwords into the announcement as it could, including claiming it would use “extended reality (XR), artificial intelligence (AI), and other immersive technologies” to let users “experience music in entirely new ways.” It’s not clear yet if the company’s many touted innovations include “Not paying for the music we stream,” which, now that we think about it, would actually be about as “Napster” as you could get.
[via Consequence]
