Jimi Hendrix Experience dispute should happen in New York, says Sony

completemusicupdate.com:

Sony Music last week told the high court in London that a dispute over the rights in the Jimi Hendrix Experience recordings should be heard in the New York courts, because the legal battle centres on agreements signed in the 1970s in the US.

And a separate lawsuit in relation to this dispute has already been filed with the courts in New York.The dispute is between Sony Music and the Jimi Hendrix estate on one side, and UK-based companies representing the estates of the other two members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience band – Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell – on the other.

The Redding and Mitchell companies claim that they control rights in the Jimi Hendrix Experience catalogue which are being infringed by the Hendrix estate and its music distribution partner Sony Music.The Hendrix estate counters that, after Hendrix’s death in 1970, both Redding and Mitchell signed agreements via which they basically gave up any copyright or royalty claims in relation to recordings made by the Jimi Hendrix Experience in return for “significant monetary consideration”.

Neither Redding nor Mitchell ever subsequently raised any issues with those agreements while they were still alive.But the Redding and Mitchell companies argue that the 1970s agreements didn’t actually see the two musicians assign any rights and only related to revenues generated by the recordings at that time, which obviously didn’t include any digital income.