Major Defeat For Google-Era Justice Department, Huge Victory for Sanity and Songwriters | MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

Great news today that the appeals court upheld BMI’s ruling by the BMI rate court judge that there is no such thing as 100% licensing under the consent decrees.  Although it’s like winning an appeal that the Sun really does rise in the East, it’s good to put that issue to one side and to poke a stick in Google’s eye.

More on this to come, but who can forget the Kafka-esque insanity of Renata Hesse and David Kully, two former Google-era Justice Department antitrust officials who saddled thier colleagues with one of the most bizarre cases in the history of the music business:  100% licensing under the out of date, anticompetitive and frankly destructive PRO consent decrees.

The Hesse and Kully’s behavior was so bad that songwriters actually had to sue the DOJ for, among other things, a brilliantly argued claim for unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation as a result of  what clearly appears to be Google-inspired overreach (see MTP’s timeline on Renata Hesse’s assault on songwriters and Scott Cleland’s timeline on how Hesse always seemed to be there at just the right time and just the right place to protect Google’s interest from the government oversight that Google loved to focus on other people–like those pesky songwriters.)

A little tea leaf reading suggests that there may be some appetite at the DOJ for at least cutting back the consent decrees if not sunseting them altogether, particularly since we have GMR and others trying to get into the PRO market in the US.  (A fact that is probably not lost on the MIC Coalition price fixing cartel which no doubt would like to see any new MRO take over PRO licensing for the true one-stop shop.)

More to say on this once I get a chance to read the opinion.

We all owe a big thanks to BMI for taking the fight to the government despite the odds against prevailing over the MIC Coalition cartel.  Truth may be stranger than fiction, but truth has a way of prevailing if you ride toward the guns.

Now maybe the DOJ could reopen an investigation of the real antitrust violators–Google and the MIC Coalition.

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