Supreme Court Rules Against Warner Music In Producer’s Battle Over Flo Rida Song
Written by Bill Donahue on May 9, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday sided with a Florida music producer in a legal battle against Warner Music over a song by the rapper Flo Rida, ruling that he can seek monetary damages dating all the way back to the 2008 release of the track.
Resolving a case that music companies had called “exceptionally important,” the justices ruled by a 6-3 vote in favor of Sherman Nealy, a Miami producer who sued Warner over claims that Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer” featured an unlicensed sample from the 1984 song “Jam the Box.”
The case before the high court dealt with a major unresolved question: Are copyright damages limited to just the last three years before a case was filed? Or can owners like Nealy seek damages ranging back decades, adding potentially many more millions to the total?
In Thursday’s ruling, the justices said it was the latter, affirming a lower appeals court that had rejected the three-year cap. “There is no time limit on monetary recovery,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her brief opinion. “So a copyright owner possessing a timely claim for infringement is entitled to damages, no matter when the infringement occurred.”
Though it dealt with esoteric questions of copyright law, Nealy’s case was closely-watched by the music industry, which has seen a large increase in decades-delayed copyright lawsuits over the past decade, targeting Led Zeppelin, U2, Meatloaf and many others. Thursday’s ruling, which creates a far larger potential prize in such cases, could encourage even more accusers to try their hand at litigation.
Crucially, however, the ruling sidestepped questions that could have created an even bigger impact. In her opinion, Kagan explicitly noted that she was not deciding an even-more-important issue: Whether someone like Nealy could file a lawsuit in the first place many years after his song was first infringed.
That question, which has divided lower courts in dueling camps with two different approaches, will need to be resolved in a future case. In Thursday’s decision, Kagan simply said that, assuming that such years-delayed cases can indeed be filed, then there should be no cap on how far back an accuser can seek to recover money.
“We do not resolve today which of those two rules should govern a copyright claim’s timeliness,” the justice wrote, referring to the split over the issue. “But we reject applying a judicially invented damages limit to convert one of them into the other.”
Neither side immediately returned requests for comment on the decision.
Nealy sued Atlantic Records, Warner Chappell and Artist Publishing Group in Florida federal court in 2018, arguing he had never actually granted them a valid license for his “Jam the Box” to be sampled in Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer,” which reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 after being released in July 2008.
In 2021, the judge overseeing ruled that Nealy couldn’t win any money from earlier than 2015, citing the three-year cap on damages. He cited a 2014 Supreme Court ruling on the movie Raging Bull, which seemed to impose that limit by saying that copyright accusers can “gain retrospective relief running only three years back.”
But earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned that ruling and said he could seek damages going back to the release of Flo Rida’s track. Adopting a so-called “discovery rule” approach used by certain other courts, the appeals court cited the fact that Nealy claimed he had only learned of the illegal sample in 2016.
Warner quickly appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, warning that the “discovery” approach would unfairly expand the “financial exposure” of a copyright defendant and potentially lead to frivolous lawsuits that aimed to “extract settlements.”
“Deprived of a predictable limitations period and faced with expensive, time-consuming, and difficult litigation in order to defend years-old uses of copyrighted works, defendants will often be left with no choice but to settle claims early even in the absence of wrongdoing—or potentially never enter valuable agreements in the first place,” Warner wrote.
Ahead of Thursday’s ruling, labels and publishers were watching Warner’s case closely. In a brief filed last year, the Recording Industry Association of America and National Music Publishers’ Association called the case “vitally important to the music industry.”
“Because copyrights are the music industry’s most consequential asset, music labels and music publishers regularly find themselves both enforcing and defending copy right lawsuits,” lawyers for RIAA and NMPA wrote. “Without a clear national rule setting the temporal limits of recoverable damages, amici and their members face serious uncertainty.”
