SiriusXM Prevails Wins Performance Rights Battle

A legal battle that lasted for nearly a decade is finally over. Way back in 2015, Pandora agreed to pay millions in back royalties to record labels for songs recorded before Feb. 15, 1972, when the United States first protected copyrights on sound recordings. The agreement did not settle every detail related to music from that era, but now Pandora — which has since been acquired by SiriusXM — has finished off the “last case standing” in the fight for pre-1972 royalties.

As Billboard reports, Judge Philip Gutierrez ruled in favor of Pandora in a lawsuit filed by two founding members of the Turtles, Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, known legally as Flo & Eddie Inc. Nine years ago the musicians launched a series of lawsuits against digital music services, also including SiriusXM, claiming that the companies were illegally refusing to pay royalties for pre-1972 songs. 

According to a report at Stereogum, The Turtles claimed that although no nationwide copyright protection existed at the time, Pandora was beholden to various state regulations. Although the musicians won the initial case, courts in California, New York, and Florida have since overturned the decision. “One after another, federal circuit courts and state Supreme Courts answered with a resounding ‘no’,” the judge wrote in his decision Wednesday.

Flo & Eddie’s case became mostly moot with the passage of 2018’s Music Modernization Act, which guaranteed some royalties on pre-1972 music and eliminated state-level ambiguity. The musicians were continuing their case, arguing that Pandora unlawfully copied and thereby “repackaged” their music in order to broadcast it. 

The judge rejected that argument and declared the matter legally resolved.

Kaylan and Volman are among the most famously litigious figures in music history. In 1991, they sued De La Soul over an unauthorized Turtles sample on the rap group’s 1989 debut album Three Feet High And Rising, a case that had a profound impact on sampling going forward.