Sony Music Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against USC

Sony Music Entertainment (SME) has fired off another social media copyright complaint – this time against the University of Southern California (USC), which is accused of “blatantly willful” infringement.

The major label just recently slapped USC with the straightforward action. Though the suit spans nearly 30 detail-oriented pages, including a rather comprehensive look at the university’s sports-program revenue, its central argument boils down to a few main claims.

As described by Sony Music, USC sports teams have for years incorporated protected recordings into social videos without licenses. In short – and as driven home by a number of similar complaints – social platforms’ song libraries are pre-cleared for personal, not commercial, use.

Here, Sony Music identified “hundreds” of allegedly infringing uploads across various USC accounts, adding for good measure that it’d probably be able to find “many more infringing uses” yet.

Unsurprisingly, much of the alleged infringement – extending to releases from Travis Scott, Elvis, Tate McRae, Future, Shakira, and others – leads back to popular USC sports teams.

Evidently, however, Sony Music has been monitoring alleged infringement on lesser-known USC social accounts as well, including for the rowing team and the “Sports Performance” center, to name a couple.

(The suit doesn’t come out and say as much, but the USC Iovine and Young Academy’s Instagram account appears to have made use of several prominent recordings, the precise licensing status of which is unclear.)

Also unsurprising is that the copyright dispute didn’t exactly sprout up overnight. Per Sony Music, it first notified USC of the alleged infringement back in 2021. Additional notifications and discussions purportedly arrived at the top of 2023 and the summer of 2024, per the legal text.

While it doesn’t necessarily need saying, settlement talks failed to bring about an amicable resolution; USC allegedly continued to infringe on certain tracks in new posts even after receiving notifications.

“As of August 15, 2024,” SME wrote here, “USC and Sony Music entered into an agreement to toll the statute of limitations to allow for settlement discussions to continue, which extended through January 15, 2025.”

Besides seeking a massive pile of damages, the plaintiffs also went ahead and not-so-subtly alluded to the possibility of additional litigation on the compositional side and from different labels.

“USC has used, without permission,” Sony Music indicated, “many sound recordings owned and controlled by numerous other record labels, as well as musical compositions owned and controlled by numerous music publishers.”

USC has already pushed back against the suit with a statement, but as mentioned, many of the allegedly infringing social videos remain live. Different defendants in similar complaints have responded by deleting the relevant uploads at once.

Just in passing, those similar complaints include a (quickly settled) suit against Marriott International, on top of multiple actions targeting Chili’s parent Brinker International, an ugly showdown between publishers and NBA teams, and a copyright dispute involving a variety of American Hockey League teams.