Re: Estate, Cascio and Porte Sued Over Three Songs on the "Michael" Album - Vera Senova Class Action
Sony confirm songs are fake: https://twitter.com/ATruthUntold/status/1031980966032490496
They've got 90 days to make a decision. If it is deemed non-commercial speech, the crooks who run MJs image are off the hook.
That's highly sensational nonsense by the MJCast, D.S. & Co. Sony and the Estate have not said anything in that regard.
Some of these people do not understand much about legal talk from lawyers and some others are intentionally twisting their lawyers' words because the media is not reporting about it which - among other things - also happens to be due to the fact that neither Sony nor the Estate have said any such thing.
It is all legal tactics to get the case dismissed for them. The same has happened about a year ago and the same people have misunderstood and/or twisted their lawyers' words. There has been no trial and there have been no "confirmations" or anything like that.
Also much of the legal proceedings have been wasted with the issue of commercial speech because if there was none, consumers could still be deceived/damaged - in the USA and other countries - due to the bona fide rights protection which in this case means that Michael Jackson was known to be a vocal performer, a singer and all of his previously released albums would contain songs that he performed on his own, not one exception.
From past empirical values consumers could rightly expect that the album or individual songs that are all labelled "Michael Jackson" would be sung by no other than Michael Jackson. Unlike groups like Genesis eg Michael Jackson did not have another singer that would perform instead of himself.
The album was teased with "Breaking News", labelled "Michael Jackson". Consumers could in no way conclude that instead they would buy songs that were not sung by Michael Jackson. They could only acquire the individual songs or the album in good faith, thus they would have been deceived/damaged if the songs were instead performed by an entirely different person. Due to Michael's name recognition and his body of work, noone would expect songs by "Michael Jackson" to be sung by person XYZ instead. That can't be said for every artist but in Michael's case there would not be any other expectation that consumers can rely on.
Additionally, the omnipresent labelling (especially in today's digital age), the credits, the (public) copyright registrations that have legal consequences - all these things are NOT commercial speech, yet they are all publicly viewable and consumers can perceive them.
A lot of wasted time and Serova's lawyers have unfortunately failed to see that. Because Sony and the Estate could not be removed from the case if they made this clear to the judges. It is an established principle of the law that protects consumers and the case should have focused on that from day one, yet not even a word about it.