Photo Credit: Pandora
Both Pandora and the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) are pushing for summary judgment in their increasingly ugly royalties dispute — with the DSP questioning whether the MLC even has standing to sue.
Days out from the second anniversary of the case’s kickoff, each litigant just recently submitted a summary judgment motion. A relatively straightforward question is at the case’s center: Did Pandora fail to cough up due blanket license royalties tied to its ad-supported radio offering?
The MLC, focusing on allegedly interactive elements thereof, certainly believes so, while Pandora has from the outset defended its free radio tier as non-interactive and therefore not subject to the mechanical obligation. But as the case has already spanned two years, it probably goes without saying that the litigation’s delivered several time-consuming twists.
Last month, on the heels of considerable back and forth, the magistrate judge settled a discovery disagreement by determining that Pandora’s “redactions appropriately withhold information that is protected by the attorney-client privilege, as experienced in the corporate context.”
Furthermore, the MLC and Pandora have jointly delayed deadlines and trial dates multiple times; technically, said trial was originally slated to take place in September 2025.
Against this backdrop, the summary judgment motions are flying: On Pandora’s end, the platform lambasted the complaint as “a gross overreach by the MLC to try to force Pandora to pay vast sums for additional mechanical rights it does not need to operate its longstanding noninteractive free radio service.”
And after emphasizing the part of “Pandora’s own assessments to the MLC” in bankrolling the action, the defendant criticized the “brazen nature” of the allegations and painted the suit as a major overstep.
“Exploiting—indeed, abusing—its limited statutory role as an administrative middleman,” Pandora counsel vented in a 75-word sentence, “the MLC seeks to use civil litigation to overturn two decades of industry practice and force upon Pandora a novel and incorrect interpretation of the Copyright Act that, as Pandora will show, even the MLC’s own rights-owner constituents have never pressed: that the ability of Pandora users to sample Pandora Premium transforms the entirety of Pandora’s ad-supported internet radio offering into an interactive service.
“But it is simply not the province of the MLC to opine on whether particular transmissions offered by Pandora or other digital music providers are properly characterized as interactive or noninteractive under the governing statutes,” Pandora proceeded, “let alone to use civil litigation to try to force Pandora to change how and what it chooses to license through the MLC.”
Running with this position, Pandora expressed the belief that the MLC’s “claimed [Copyright Act enforcement] authority violates the Constitution’s separation of powers twice over.”
Not stopping there, Pandora filed a separate “notice of constitutional question” and forwarded a corresponding notification to the attorney general.
(Also on the standing front, SoundExchange is appealing in its legal battle with Pandora parent SiriusXM; months later, the plodding process has yet to kick into high gear, the appropriate docket shows.)
Beyond this constitutional question, even if the MLC’s allegedly “unconstitutional lawsuit could proceed,” the main contention “is plainly and unmistakably wrong under the Copyright Act,” per Pandora.
“Resolving this claim involves a straightforward application of the Copyright Act to Pandora’s ad-supported free service offering—most directly, the proper legal interpretation of the term ‘interactive service’ under Section 114 of the Copyright Act, which in turn determines Pandora’s treatment under Section 115 of the Act,” Pandora summed up.
On the opposite side of the courtroom confrontation, the MLC opted to shield much of its own summary judgment motion (and related declarations as well as some relevant videos to boot) from the public view.
Heavy redactions aside, the entity, seeking summary judgment “on liability…because there is no genuine issue of material fact with respect to the liability of” Pandora, doubled down on its interactive-streaming and owed payments claims.
“The evidence shows that Pandora’s product design and deployment of on-demand functionality within Pandora Free has been an intentional and central part of Pandora’s product development,” the MLC wrote in one redaction-free section. “In sum, it is not disputed that Pandora Free enables users to stream music from its catalog on demand.”
