Fred Durst at the “Y2K” Premiere as part of SXSW 2024 Conference and Festivals held at the Paramount Theatre on March 9, 2024 in Austin, Texas.
Renee Dominguez/SXSW Conference & Festivals/Getty Images
Universal Music Group responded to Fred Durst’s fraud lawsuit for the first time last week, saying the Limp Bizkit frontman’s allegations against the company were “based on a fallacy” while motioning for the case to be tossed.
“Plaintiffs’ entire narrative that UMG tried to conceal royalties is a fiction,” the company said in their motion on Friday.
The response comes over a month after Durst first sued the world’s largest music company in October, alleging that the record company had “designed and implemented royalty software and systems that were deliberately designed to conceal artists’ royalties and keep those profits for itself.”
Durst and his attorneys claimed that UMG owed the band as much as $200 million, and that he’d “not seen a dime” in royalties before their inquiries. The suit accused UMG of fraud, negligent misrepresentation and copyright infringement. The suit also demanded Durst and the band receive full ownership of their music.
In the response, however, UMG said that the dispute started with a director at the company reaching out to Limp Bizkit‘s manager over email seeking to set up a vendor profile so the band could get their recording royalties. The business manager had told the UMG director that most of the band members had sold off their royalty shares, but over a year later, he emailed again, clarifying he was referring to publishing royalties, not the recordings. UMG said the email communications, which they included in their reply, “eviscerate” the fraud claims.
UMG maintains that they began the process soon after and paid the band over $1 million in back royalties while giving Durst’s record label Flawless Records $2.3 million, which the company said was all of the “outstanding royalties and profits.”
“Despite these payments, on September 30, 2024, Plaintiffs served UMG with a formal Notice of Rescission of the Flip Agreement, the Recording Agreement, and the Flawless Agreement,” the company wrote of Durst’s decision to sue. “When UMG rejected the Rescission Notice, Plaintiffs filed the present action, asserting no less than 15 state (and one federal) putative claims for relief.”
Responding to UMG’s motion, a rep for Limp Bizkit said that “we will reply on the facts, the law and the courts.”
“When someone is caught red-handed, their first response is often to hire very expensive outside law firms who first, as a matter of course, try anything to dismiss the suit when they are in trouble with the facts,” the representative said. “In this case, we believe UMG is using a typical, formulaic, well-trodden strategy of reaching for any escape route by desperately grasping at technicalities.”
From Rolling Stone US.
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