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Eminem sues to stop ringtones
Slim Shady's publishing companies file lawsuit against five firms to stop them from selling his songs as mobile phone downloads.
Last we heard from Grammy-winning rapper Eminem, he was being treated in a hospital for a drug dependency, just a few weeks after announcing he was "taking a break" from his own music.
Now comes word that Slim Shady--via his two publishing companies, Eight Mile Style and Martin Affiliated--has filed suit in the US District Court in Detroit to stop five companies from making his songs available online for cell phone ringtones.
The suit seeks a court order to block the sale of Eminem ringtones offered by Colorado-based Cellus USA, Georgia-based FanMobile, New York-based Nextones.com, New Jersey-based MyPhoneFiles, and New Jersey-based MatrixM LLC.
"This is a big business," the rapper's lawyer, Howard Hertz, told the Detroit News. "We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."
Ringtones are growing in popularity. Recent numbers from IFPI indicated that digital music sales, which include ringtones, downloads, and subscription services, tripled in the first half of 2005, to $790 million.
Ringtone revenue more than doubled to $217 million in 2004 and will triple that figure $724 million by 2009, according to a Jupiter Research report published earlier this year.
The rapper's lawyers also plan to sue karaoke firms that fail to obtain proper licenses.
"We're going to be going after any ringtones or karaoke companies who use his songs without getting the proper licenses," Hertz told the News.
This isn't the first time Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, has targeted unlicensed digital use of his music.
In February 2004, he sued Apple for using the lyrics from "Lose Yourself," his Oscar-winning theme from the movie 8-Mile in which he starred, in an iPod commercial. The parties eventually settled the case with an undisclosed financial payment.
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