Roberts v. BroadwayHD LLC

Background

Chapman Roberts alleged that he created vocal arrangements for the Broadway musical Smokey Joe’s Café in 1994 and later registered an exclusive copyright in those arrangements. According to the Second Amended Complaint, defendants authorized, licensed, distributed, or streamed a recording of the musical that included the arrangements without Roberts’s permission or compensation.

Roberts asserted direct and contributory copyright-infringement claims, a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act concerning false copyright-management information, and a common-law unjust-enrichment claim. In this round of motions, BroadwayHD and Amazon Digital Services moved to dismiss the claims against them. Leiber Stoller Productions, Michael Stoller, the Estate of Jerome Leiber, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing separately moved to dismiss the claims against them under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), which allows dismissal when a complaint does not adequately state a legal claim.

Copyright claims

The defendants argued that Roberts’s copyright claims were actually untimely ownership disputes. The court rejected that argument at the pleading stage. It held that the Second Amended Complaint presented infringement claims because Roberts alleged that he owned the arrangements and that defendants exceeded limited licenses by authorizing or using them in the recording without his permission. The court stated that the central question was whether defendants had valid licenses to use the arrangements, not who owned them.

The court therefore denied BroadwayHD and Amazon’s motion to dismiss in full. It also denied Sony/ATV’s motion to dismiss Roberts’s contributory copyright-infringement claim. Roberts plausibly alleged that Sony/ATV materially contributed to later infringement by granting a synchronization license to Broadway Worldwide, which then licensed the recording to BroadwayHD for digital streaming. The court acknowledged weaknesses in this claim but concluded that the allegations met the plausibility standard at this stage.

The court also denied the Leiber and Stoller defendants’ motion to dismiss Roberts’s contributory copyright-infringement claim. It found that their alleged referral of Broadway Worldwide to Sony/ATV, standing alone, was not a sufficient material contribution. But Roberts also alleged that these defendants had to approve Sony/ATV’s synchronization license under the parties’ agreement and benefited financially from it. The court held that those allegations plausibly connected the defendants to the alleged downstream infringement.

Unjust enrichment

The court granted the Leiber and Stoller defendants’ and Sony/ATV’s motions to dismiss Roberts’s unjust-enrichment claim. It held that the claim was preempted by Section 301(a) of the Copyright Act because it sought to protect rights equivalent to copyright rights, including control over copying, distribution, and public performance.

The court rejected Roberts’s argument that alleged misrepresentations supplied an additional element that would avoid preemption. It also rejected his argument that unjust enrichment could proceed as an alternative theory of recovery. Because the claim sought compensation for the same alleged unauthorized use of the copyrighted arrangements, the court dismissed it with prejudice.

Disposition

Judge Katherine Polk Failla denied in full BroadwayHD and Amazon’s motion to dismiss. She granted in part and denied in part the Leiber and Stoller defendants’ and Sony/ATV’s motions: she granted them as to the unjust-enrichment claim and denied them as to the contributory copyright-infringement claim. The defendants were ordered to answer the Second Amended Complaint, and the parties were ordered to submit case-management materials and a status update concerning discovery.