Five months after launching a copyright infringement suit against hotel giant Marriott, Sony Music Entertainment appears to have settled the case.
In a joint filing with a federal court in Maryland on Tuesday (October 8), Sony and Marriott asked that the case be dismissed “with prejudice,” meaning it can’t be refiled.
Court documents didn’t indicate whether the two companies had come to an out-of-court settlement.
Sony, along with affiliated labels Sony Music Latin, Arista Music, Arista Records, Ultra, LaFace, and Records Label LLC – plus Rimas Entertainment, the home of Bad Bunny – filed the lawsuit last May, alleging “rampant” copyright infringement by Marriott International in its social media posts.
Lawyers for Sony said they had identified 931 instances of unauthorized use of Sony’s music in social media posts from hotels owned, managed, or franchised by Marriott. They asserted that the hotel chain’s infringements weren’t limited to music owned by Sony.
Under US copyright law, that number of infringements would have exposed Marriott to around $140 million in statutory damages.
Marriott International is the world’s largest hotel chain by number of beds. It owns, manages, or franchises hotels under the Marriott, Sheraton, Westin, Ritz-Carlton, and Le Meridien brands.
Sony’s complaint against Marriott, which can be read in full here, alleged that the hotel chain’s use of Sony’s music in social media posts was at times carefully designed to capitalize on the popularity of a particular song or artist, and that Marriott was “well aware” of the impact of music to the visibility of its promotional social media posts.
“It is no accident that the Marriott Videos use some of the most popular sound recordings in Sony Music’s library,” the complaint stated.
“On algorithm-driven social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, adding popular sound recordings to a post causes it to appear in the feeds of users who are interested in the music and might not otherwise come across the Marriott posts…
“Including these popular sound recordings leads users to discover posts when searching on the platform for content incorporating certain artists, songs or music-related tags.”
In recent years, Sony has launched a number of lawsuits over alleged unauthorized use of its music in advertising.
It launched a lawsuit against fitness apparel brand Gymshark in 2021, alleging that the company had infringed the copyright of 297 recordings in its ads. The two companies settled the lawsuit out of court in 2022.
In 2021, it sued cosmetics brand OFRA, alleging that the cosmetics brand had violated copyright on “hundreds” of Sony songs.
OFRA had “achieved its success through blatant, willful, and repeated copyright infringement of the sound recordings and musical compositions of various content owners,” Sony alleged in the case, which is still ongoing.Music Business Worldwide