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Sony sues United Airlines over in-flight music system
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 24 October 2013
Quite how a major airline could be providing its customers with access to music via its in-flight entertainment system without the appropriate licences, and how that could have gone unnoticed by the labels until know, I’m not sure. But Sony Music is accusing United Airlines of making its content available without licence, and is suing, pushing for an injunction to stop the on-plane music service and compensation for past infringement.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Sony got wise to the allegedly infringing music service via a consultancy hired by the airline and another company, Inflight Productions, to advise on rights issues. That consultancy is now also listed as a defendant in Sony’s lawsuit, and the major is reportedly also reviewing other in-flight music platforms looking for other operators in the sky who might also be breaking the copyright laws of their home jurisdictions.
Of course under American copyright law there is no general public performance right for sound recordings, which is presumably how a company like United Airlines ended up operating an unlicensed service, but Sony insists that the nature of the airline’s content system means a licence is required, not least because the platform makes copies of recordings as well as playing them.
The lawsuit also reckons that United couldn’t rely on the kind of statutory licence utilised by Pandora et al, because of the fully on-demand nature of the service. Though, just to be certain on that point, the litigation also specifically references pre-1972 Sony recordings used by United Airlines, on the basis that the statutory licence, created by federal American law, can only apply to works protected under the federal copyright system (ie recordings since 1972). This argument, of course, has cropped up in several American lawsuits in recent years, and the rights and wrongs of it are yet to be fully resolved.
