Yet another comedian sues Pandora over unlicensed jokes

completemusicupdate.com:

Yet another comedian has sued US streaming service Pandora over allegations it failed to fully license his comedy routines. This time its George Lopez going legal, accusing Pandora of infringing his copyrights.There have been a flurry of lawsuits of this kind against Pandora this year, all of them making pretty much the same claims – basically that while Pandora secured the rights to stream recordings of each comedian’s performances, they failed to get permission to stream the routines contained within those recordings, what in legal terms would be considered the ‘literary works’.In music, of course, streaming services like Pandora secure two sets of licences, one from the record industry covering recording rights, and then another set from the music publishing sector covering the separate song rights.However, with spoken word content, generally only licences covering the recording rights have been sought.

The services would likely argue that until recently there was nowhere to go to license the literary works, with the comedy community not having publishers or collecting societies specifically representing those rights.

However, in the US at least, agencies have now launched to represent the rights in comedy material.It’s not just Pandora which has been criticised for under licensing its comedy content, with Spotify also coming under fire over all this last year.