(Bloomberg) — Comedian Lewis Black, who has turned angry rants into a career, is irate with streaming giant Pandora, which he claims is airing his material without permission.
The recurring guest on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” sued Pandora Media LLC for copyright infringement, seeking more than $10 million in damages, in the complaint filed Thursday in Los Angeles federal court.
Black’s claim is the latest in a series of lawsuits brought by comedians against Pandora that may reveal how the streaming industry deals with novel licensing issues around the growing popularity of spoken word content.
Comedians say streaming platforms need to pay them — as the authors of jokes — in the same way songwriters are paid royalties for writing lyrics.
“Pandora did what most goliaths do: it decided it would infringe now to ensure it had this very valuable intellectual property on its platform to remain competitive, and deal with the consequences later,” Black said in the complaint.
“Later is now.”
Pandora, which was acquired by Sirius XM Holdings Inc. in 2019, says on its website that it’s the largest digital broadcast and streaming music provider in the US, with 70 million listeners and users each month.
Sirius declined to comment on Black’s claim, but in responding to a group of similar lawsuits in May, that included claims from the estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin, Pandora said decadeslong tradition of licensing the use of comedy recordings is being threatened.
Until now, no comedian has ever licensed separately or collected a separate and additional royalty for the reproduction, or distribution of the underlying jokes embodied in any of their comedy recordings, Pandora said.
Distributors pay the source, or creator, of the final product — usually a recording label, the company said.
“Comedy, like every other copyright-intensive industry except the dysfunctional music licensing market, has always followed a ‘licensing at the source’ model,” Pandora said.
But Spoken Giants, which represents hundreds of comics and their estates, including Black, said streaming services like Sirius and Pandora should have learned a lesson from their futile battles with songwriters over royalties.
The group dismissed Pandora’s claim that royalties should be paid to the source.
“It’s the equivalent of saying a license with Columbia Records to stream a Bob Dylan album negates the need to also pay songwriting royalties to him,” Jim King, chief executive officer of Spoken Giants, said in an emailed statement.
Pandora used 68 of Black’s works without permission, according to the complaint.
He’d be entitled to $150,000 for copyright infringement for each work under current law, Black said in the complaint.
“Mr. Black once famously quipped in the wake of the Enron Scandal: ‘You don’t want another Enron?
Here’s your law: If a company can’t explain in one sentence what it does, it’s illegal,”’ Black’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “The exact same thing is true here: If a company can’t explain in one sentence how it has a license to use copyrighted works, it’s copyright infringement.”
The case is Black v.
Pandora Media LLC, 2:22-cv-04634, US District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles).
(Updates with Pandora’s defense in sixth paragraph.)
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