Issue No. 061
October 2, 2026
New York
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The IP Briefing · by ESCA Legal
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| Mattie Music Group, the publisher of Bill Withers' catalog, filed a federal copyright lawsuit over Olivia Dean's I've Seen It. The complaint alleges that the song copies protected melody from Just the Two of Us and names Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, Sony, and Kobalt entities as defendants. Dean and her co-writers are not defendants. |
| § | The complaint was filed October 1 in the Central District of California and concerns the underlying musical composition, not ownership of the Withers recording. | | § | Mattie alleges that a musicologist identified substantial similarities in protected expression and that the defendants continued exploiting the song after an August 17 notice. | | § | The publisher seeks an injunction, damages, and profits attributable to the alleged infringement. The court has not decided the merits. |
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| § ESCA Takeaway |
| The Olivia Dean dispute targets the companies distributing and licensing the song, not the artist or her co-writers. The complaint separates the musical composition from the recording and seeks relief from both label and publishing defendants. |
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| More IP Stories |
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| § Trademark · Pending |
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| A California federal judge dismissed Williams-Sonoma's false advertising and related claims against Quince without prejudice. The September 30 order found that the retailer had not plausibly alleged actionable false or misleading comparisons. Williams-Sonoma may file an amended complaint by October 21. |
| § | The court rejected the theory that Quince's Beyond Compare charts necessarily represent the competing products as identical. | | § | The order distinguished statements that products are similar from claims of literal identity and found gaps in the allegations about quality, pricing, consumer deception, and injury. | | § | The ruling addresses the sufficiency of this complaint. It does not end the case with prejudice or resolve every possible challenge to comparative advertising. |
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Why it matters
The dispute concerns how a retailer uses established home-goods brands in comparison marketing. The court required factual support for the challenged representations rather than treating references to competing brands as sufficient by themselves.
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| § Copyright · Update |
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| The Third Circuit affirmed partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters in its copyright case against ROSS Intelligence. The court held that 2,243 Westlaw headnotes were sufficiently original for protection and that ROSS's use of them to train a competing legal search system was not fair use. |
| § | ROSS used training memoranda derived from Westlaw headnotes to help its system identify judicial passages responsive to legal questions. | | § | The court emphasized the competing platforms' similar purposes and the effect on the value of Westlaw's legal research service. | | § | ROSS's system returned existing judicial text rather than generating new expression. The opinion addresses that record, not every use of copyrighted material in generative AI. |
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Why it matters
The opinion distinguishes public judicial opinions from a publisher's protected editorial material. Its fair use analysis turns on the particular training use and competition between the two legal research platforms.
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This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Published by ESCA Legal. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Attorney advertising; prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
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