Licensing groups representing comedians, including the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin, will not have to face a suit in sprawling litigation accusing them of monopolizing the market for the rights to the recordings of “superstar” comics.
A federal judge on April 5 dismissed Pandora’s countersuit against Word Collection and Spoken Giants, rejecting antitrust arguments from the audio company faulting the group for its alleged failure to assemble a viable comedy streaming service. U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi found that the comedians reasonably bargained collectively in the pursuit of higher royalties on top of getting paid for a copyright license that has historically been overlooked.
The dispute revolves around a feud between streamers and comedians pushing to change the landscape of compensation. The comics raise novel licensing theories claiming that they should be paid for writing their jokes, much in the same way that musicians are paid royalties for composing song lyrics. While comedians are able to license the copyrights to their recorded performances, the comedians stress that they should also be paid royalties for the copyrights to their underlying written works.
The legal battle started in 2021, when Spotify took down albums from several stand-up comics, including Tiffany Haddish, Kevin Hart and John Mulaney, amid the conflict over licensing rights. The estates of Williams and Carlin, joined by Lewis Black, Andrew Dice Clay, Bill Engvall and Ron White, then sued Pandora, claiming that the company and other streaming services don’t properly license their performances.
The company, in turn, brought an antitrust countersuit against Spoken Giants and Word Collections, which was formed in 2020 and requires exclusive partnerships with authors so that it can set a single price for all assets in its portfolio. In addition to price-fixing, Pandora alleged these agreements constitute an anticompetitive conspiracy to corner the market on the rights to routines from popular comedians, since the group allegedly agreed not to license “independently outside of the cartel,” according to the complaint. Since Word Collections represents so many different comedians, Pandora said that it’s forced to work with the agency if it wants to offer a “critical mass” of comedy routines. It accused the comedians of bringing the copyright suits as a way to force it to pay overpriced licenses.
In October, Scarsi dismissed the suit but allowed leave to amend.
Jim King, CEO of Spoken Giants, said that the group “will continue to aggressively advocate on behalf of our comedian-members to ensure that comedians’ spoken word copyrights are protected and paid for by digital services such as Pandora.”
Pandora didn’t respond to requests for comment.
