California Common Law Copyright Win For IHeartMedia

PONDEROSA TWINS PLUS ONE V. IHEARTMEDIA, INC. No. 16-CV-05648-VC, 2020 WL 3481737 (N.D. Cal. Jun. 26, 2020).

Plaintiff, Spicer, filed a complaint claiming that IHeartMedia improperly made use of Spicer’s sound recordings. The claim argued that Defendant committed common law copyright infringement under section 980 of the California Civil Code. The court dismissed all of the Spicer’s claims with leave to amend and granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss. There was no indication that common-law copyright in the 1960s included preventing someone from playing a sound recording publicly. The Court also mentioned that regardless of the common law copyright laws that existed at the time, Spicer lost rights to the recordings once the recordings were published. The Court ruled that the alleged infringement of public-performance copyright did not exist.