[The IPKat] [Guest post] Eight Mile Style sues Meta for Shady-ness of Eminem’s early catalogue

[Eleonora Rosati]

[Guest post] Eight Mile Style sues Meta for Shady-ness of Eminem’s early catalogue

 Eleonora Rosati Monday, September 08, 2025 - copyright, eminem, Georgia Jenkins, Guest post, style

The IPKat has received and is pleased to host the following post by Katfriend Georgia Jenkins (University of Liverpool), on a lawsuit recently filed in the US concerning protectability of styles, notably Eminem’s. Here’s what Georgia writes:

Eight Mile Style sues Meta for Shady-ness of Eminem’s early catalogue

by Georgia Jenkins

Like many artists before him, when Marshall B. Mathers (a.k.a. Slim Shady and Eminem) signed an exclusive recording artist agreement with F.B.T. Productions in 1995, it stipulated that its owners, Mark and Jeff Bass, would receive exclusive rights to his recordings. A few years later, they transferred these recordings to Aftermath Records, co-owned by Interscope and Universal Media Group (UMG) Recordings, after meeting with the infamous Dr. Dre. In return, the Bass brothers received between 12-20% of the adjusted retail price of all ‘full price records sold in the United States … through normal retail channels’, and 50% of Aftermath’s net receipt on ‘masters licensed by us … to others for their manufacture and sale of records or for any other uses’ (Apple lawsuit). Eventually they entered into a new agreement which increased some royalty rates, but affirmed these clauses.

In the two decades that followed, the Bass brothers (perhaps music distribution clairvoyants) sought to clarify the royalties owed to them, relating to licensing agreements from Apple’s downloadable ringtones (above) to Spotify streaming early hits such as ‘Lose Yourself’. This kind of litigious activity, Jeff posits in an interview, perhaps lead to his own experience of exploitation in the music industry (e.g. the Bass brothers’ lacking attribution from Eminem’s origin story within pop culture). And while there are certainly questionable rightsholder acquisitions over master recordings (Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun’s dispute comes to mind), the Bass brothers’ story hints at a more muddled creative relationship with Eminem. Not only did they discover Marshall, but they also produced his earlier work, with Jeff describing it as collaboration. It means that the Jeff Bass has production credits and co-writing credits on a number of early songs, the best-known being ‘Lose Yourself’.

Fast forward to 2025: Meta occupies the same spotlight with the same 243 works cited as infringed by Eight Mile Style. The complaint details that Meta’s platforms reproduced and synchronised these works to ‘visual content across millions of videos, which have been viewed billions of times’. Further, that they offer creator tools (e.g. Original Audio and Reels Remix) that allow and encourage:

users to steal Eight Mile Style’s music from another user’s posted audiovisual content and then use it in their own subsequent videos without proper attribution or licence, resulting in exponential infringement.

Described as ‘rampant infringement’, Eight Mile Style allege that this is a case of ‘knowing infringement’ by first reproducing and storing these works in Meta Online Music Libraries, and then distributing them for users to select and incorporate into their own social media posts across WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. All without a licence. They point to Meta entering into an agreement with Audiam Inc. in a bid to secure an (unsuccessful) licence with Eight Mile Style as proof of knowledge, alongside the removal of some of these works from its libraries before the complaint was filed. They characterise Meta as yet another:

‘trillion (with a ‘T’) dollar company exploiting the creative efforts of musical artists for the obscene monetary benefit of its executives and shareholders without a licence and without regard to the rights of the owners of the intellectual property’.

Meta has stated that:

it has licences with thousands of partners globally and “extensive” global licensing programs for music on its platforms’. Further that, ‘Meta has been negotiating in good faith with Eight Mile Style, but rather than continue those discussions, Eight Mile Style chose to sue.

The significance and role of platforms that fall under Meta’s umbrella has completely changed the way we discover and engage with music. The architecture of their business, i.e. advertising, has led Eight Mile Style to assert that they have ‘enjoyed massive profits at Eight Mile Style’s expense’. The impact of this unauthorised use has led them to claim inter alia ‘maximum statutory damages for wilful copyright infringement for each of Eight Mile Style’s works ($150,000 per work, times 243 works, times 3 platforms)’.

Comment

At this point, it would seem that Eight Mile Style are simply a clog caught up in a larger system of inequitable exploitation. That said, in 2024, their Spotify lawsuit for streaming the same early works without authorisation was unsuccessful. The press described this a 'legal loophole' for Spotify as the Court had found that Eight Mile Style had a strong prima facie case of copyright infringement. The defence of equitable estoppel relates to Eight Mile Style’s conduct during licensing negotiations. The Court stated:

Eight Mile Style is not a hapless victim, but, rather, a sophisticated steward of its copyrights that was aware that the licensing status of its compositions had fallen into confusion and simply allowed its rights to be violated in a way that would be entirely inexplicable other than as a strategic choice to manufacture infringement damages.

Collective storytelling frames our perception and crucially impacts our understanding of the legal system, but more broadly, justice. The stories that have been told in the copyright and music industry space from the starving artist to the exploitative record label, and now, free-riding platforms, have set the scene for reform. But it is also important to view copyright interests as multi-faceted actors set against an incredibly complex legal landscape that requires transparency for any sustainable change. While the Bass brothers’ story, specifically their alleged erasure from Eminem’s origin story, may strike sentimentally, as Jeff also comments, it’s just business.

And so, when the news broke in May 2025 that Eight Mile Style was suing Meta, Eminem released a statement unsurprisingly distancing himself from the continuing saga. It would seem that Eminem, Slim Shady and Marshall, a combination of rap personas and artist, provide a good starting point for view the music industry as just that: business and storytelling.

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