Sony Music Entertainment (SME) has settled a copyright lawsuit against the makers of the 2022 biopic Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody.
In a filing with the US District Court for the Central District of California on Monday (November 18), lawyers for Sony said they were dismissing the suit “in its entirety, with prejudice,” meaning the lawsuit can’t be refiled.
SME and its label, Arista, filed the copyright lawsuit in February, naming Anthem Films and NYBO Productions as defendants, along with Black Label Media, and the company set up to produce the movie, WH Movie. The complaint alleged the companies failed to pay the licensing fees for 24 Whitney Houston tracks used in the movie.
Those tracks include I Will Always Love You, So Emotional, I’m Every Woman, How Will I Know, and I’m Your Baby Tonight.
Houston signed to Arista Records – at the time owned by Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and RCA Records – in 1983. She became one of the biggest-selling artists of the 1980s and 1990s, and went on to sell more than 220 million records. Houston died in 2012 at the age of 48.
The biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody was released in December 2022 and grossed some $60 million worldwide, according to Sony’s complaint against the filmmakers.
The complaint accused the production companies of “willful and unauthorized use” of Houston’s songs, despite having signed a sync licensing agreement with Sony days before the movie’s release.
In August 2023, Sony sent a letter to Anthem notifying the company that it was in breach of its agreement with Sony, according to the complaint, and Anthem responded that it would be able to pay the licensing fees once it received a tax credit due the company from the state of Massachusetts.
Sony responded that it would agree to wait until the tax credit came through, provided that this new arrangement was put on paper. However, Anthem said that it couldn’t sign such an agreement because Black Label Media, an investor in the movie, had control over expenditures and Black Label had refused to authorize the payment to SME.
“To date, Anthem has not paid the fees, or any portion of the fees, due under the agreements,” stated the February complaint, which can be read in full here.
“As a result of Anthem’s failure to pay the fees and to cure such failure, any use by Anthem and/or Black Label of the SME Recordings in the film is (and has been) unauthorized and an infringement of SME’s rights.”
The amount the filmmakers agreed to pay for the sync licenses was redacted from the public version of Sony’s complaint. However, the company had asked for $150,000 per violation – the statutory maximum under US copyright law – which would amount to a total of $3.6 million.Music Business Worldwide
