A significant legal dispute involving a prominent YouTube star has been resolved. Michelle Phan, whose beauty videos have earned her nearly eight million subscribers on the world’s most popular video site, has settled out of court with Ultra Records, which in July 2014 accused her of illegally using its artists’ tracks as background music.
Ultra’s initial claim concerned artists like Kaskade, who Phan frequently used as the soundtrack for her makeup tutorials. According to Ultra, Phan never properly acquired the licenses she needed to use those tracks, and the label claimed she “continues to willfully infringe in blatant disregard of Plaintiff’s rights of ownership.”
Shortly after news of Ultra’s claim broke, Phan’s team fired back. Her legal advisors launched a counterclaim in September 2014, in which they argued that “Ultra agreed to allow Michelle to use the music and Michelle intends to fight this lawsuit and bring her own claims against Ultra.” The counterclaim referred to a series of emails between Phan and a member of the Ultra team in which the label’s representative agreed to let Phan use its music. The main question raised by the case was whether this unofficial blessing protected Phan, even though she never seems to have obtained official licenses for Ultra songs.
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We’re not going to learn the answer to that question, at least not in this case. Details of the settlement were not disclosed and neither side has offered any comment on the matter as of yet.
Even though Phan and Ultra managed to avoid a long trial, the relationship between labels and online video content creators remains a gray area. A similar case launched earlier this year, for example, pits a licensing company called Freeplay Music against multi-channel networks like Machinima and Collective Digital Studio. This is the sort of issue that, at some point or another, is going to have to be resolved in court–but Phan and Ultra won’t be the ones to do that.
