The estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin sued Sirius XM’s Pandora Media Inc on Monday, claiming the online music service owed royalties for streaming their content millions of times.
Williams and Carlin’s estates, along with comedians Bill Engwall, Ron White and Andrew Dice Clay, have not received “a fraction of a penny” from Pandora, they said in five separate federal lawsuits filed by the same attorney in Los Angeles.
The lawsuits have sought damages ranging from $4 million for Williams’s estate to about $13 million for White.
Carlin and Williams were two of the most popular comedians of all time. Carlin died in 2008 and Williams in 2014. Angwall and White are best known for their performances on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, while Clay was a major performer in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The lawsuits say that Pandora’s license for recording comedians does not include their implicit jokes. While companies such as Pandora often negotiate with performing-rights organizations such as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers to license music rights, these groups do not license literary works such as spoken-word comedy, the comedian said.
He said that Pandora knew it was infringing on her rights. Pandora’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission from 2011 to 2017 reportedly stated that it played the spoken-word comedy “absent a specific license from any performing rights association” and was subject to “significant liability for copyright infringement”. may face.
A rights-management group discussed licensing the works with Pandora starting in 2020, but Pandora ended discussions last year, the complaints said.
Internet radio giant Sirius XM bought Pandora in 2018 for $3.5 billion, in a bid to scale its streaming services against rivals such as Spotify and Apple Music. A Sirius spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The comedian’s attorney declined to comment on the lawsuit.
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