No. 2:19-cv-8719 (C.D. Cal. 2019)

Comment by Charles Cronin

Here’s an interesting dispute touching on slippery questions about the rights of co-authors. The defendant never filed a response to the complaint, so we have only the plaintiff’s version of the tangled history of the creation and publication of the contested work. Assuming the accuracy of the complaint, however, the defendant’s filing of a DMCA take-down notice against the plaintiff appears both malicious and uninformed. The complaint notes the defendant’s contrived and legally bogus “first use” claim, and establishes the legitimacy of the non-exclusive license plaintiff entered into for this work of joint authorship.

The defendant’s conduct appears to have been motivated by interest in his musical “start” by the aptly monikered “Diplo” (purportedly a “music producer” and Temple Univ. undergraduate dropout) and hopes of developing an exclusive and potentially lucrative collaboration involving musical expression (ahem) already part of a work of joint authorship. Today’s “collaborative” approach to pop music creation, in which original expression — assuming there is any — is authored by sound engineers, leads to messy and ambiguous ownership disputes like this one.

Complaint: PDF