UPDATE: Eminem clarified that he is not personally a part of the lawsuit.
“8 Mile Style is a publishing company that administers my early catalog releases,” he said in a statement to E! News June 4. “The Meta lawsuit came from them, not me. I’m not personally involved with it and I am not a party to the suit.”
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Eminem‘s team is not afraid to go toe-to-toe with a social media giant.
The “Love the Way You Lie” rapper’s publishing company Eight Mile Style filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms—which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—accusing the tech company of copyright infringement and seeking over $109 million in damages, according to court documents filed May 30 and obtained by E! News June 3.
In the filing, the publisher of Eminem (real name Marshall Mathers) alleges that Meta violated the copyright of 243 songs from his catalog through the “unauthorized storage, reproduction and exploitation” of the tracks on their platforms. The lawsuit cites the apps’ features, including Original Audio and Reels, as tools that “allow and encourage its users to steal” his music to use in video content “without proper attribution or license.”
As a result, the company is seeking monetary damages for “the diminished value of the copyrights by Defendants’ theft of them, lost profits, and Defendants’ profits attributable to the infringement.” Alternatively, they asked for the maximum statutory damages, requesting $150,000 for each of the songs in question across all three of Meta’s platforms, totaling a whopping $109,350,000.
