Spotify has won a prolonged lawsuit claiming that Eminem’s music was streamed illegally “billions” of times on the platform. Eminem’s publisher, Eight Mile Style, had initially sued Spotify back in 2019, claiming that the music streaming service had failed to get proper licenses for hundreds of the rapper’s songs. The judge wrote that Eight Mile knew for years that its songs were being played on Spotify, but had chosen to do nothing in order to build a more lucrative legal case against them.

“Eight Mile Style was not a hapless victim,” Judge Aleta A. Trauger wrote. “While Spotify’s handling of composer copyrights appears to have been seriously flawed, any right to recover damages based on those flaws belongs to those innocent rights holders who were genuinely harmed, not ones who, like Eight Mile Style, had every opportunity to set things right and simply chose not to do so for no apparent reason, other than that being the victim of infringement pays better than being an ordinary licensor.” Eight Mile Style has not publicly commented on the decision, while Eminem himself was not involved in the case. (Rolling Stone)