(Getting a lot of use lately out of this artificial intelligence-generated “Scale of Music Copyright Justice” image we prompted, aren’t we?)
After nearly four years, Trump finally lost the Eddy Grant “Electric Avenue” case, as we said he would. That case now moves to its damages phase. And we might take a somewhat wild guess how that will go, just for fun. You hear so much about prediction markets like PredictIt these days, there might be a way to bet on this outcome. We won’t do that, but we can still guess. How does $450,000 sound? Let’s imagine, the upper limit of statutory damages is $300,000 (only for willful infringement), and then there are lawyers fees, and perhaps some damages around the negative association an Eddy Grant would assign to being connected with Trump. And ordinarily I’d assign a discount to the statutory upper limit, but if you go with a fair-use defense of transformative use, don’t you injure your argument around the infringement not being willful?
We’ll see.
But the timing is amazing, since Jack White and The White Stripes just a week ago sued Trump for putting “Seven Nation Army” into a video posted to social media and as Musicologize wrote then, this has way more teeth than all those “you played my song at your campaign rally and didn’t ask my permission first” cases we read about seemingly every week. Placing someone else’s intellectual property into your production almost every single time requires a license. Fair use is a poor get out of jail free card more often than people seem to think.
So another prediction now. Musicologize predicts that the Trump campaign will settle this “Seven Nation Army” case in relatively short order.
Cats and dogs, that guy had himself a week, eh?
