EMI Sues EA Over Music Rights

[OuFtb]

Reuters reported today that EMI Group Plc, one of the giants of the record industry, has filed suit against Electronic Arts, one of the giants of the video game industry, over the use of music in several of EA's sports titles.

According to the story, EMI alleges that EA titles such as Madden NFL 2004, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 and MVP Baseball 2004 use tracks that "embody copyrighted musical compositions that EMI owns, co-owns, administers or otherwise controls."

The game publisher appears dismissive of the charges. "This entire lawsuit is related to a single song that samples lyrics from another song," Electronic Arts is quoted as stating. "Our use of that song was licensed directly from the artist. We have agreements for every song used in our games."

EMI, however, reportedly claims that while EA made song license requests for games throughout 2003, the games were released before the licenses were granted.

EMI is seeking damages and a possible percentage of EA's profits on the titles in question, which EMI suggests may be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Electronic Arts is known in the industry for their aggressive licensing of film franchises, sports figure likenesses, and popular music. Given that much of the company's success is built on such licenses, it would be surprising to find that they became careless with their licensing from EMI.

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/508/508556p1.html

I figured this would make all you EA haters out there happy.

[l Maximus l]

I'm not a huge EA fan, however, I think it's pretty lame for EMI to go after them if they already got approval from the artists. Just my $0.02. I don't think EA recklessly or purposely used the music to damage EMI...atleast based on the information from the article. EA is not really known for sloppy business practice...they're simply known for being stubborn (i.e. with Microsoft).