Spotify barks at Lowery: ‘Stop changing the goal posts’
The $150 million battle between Spotify and David Lowery gets a little uglier every day. In response to Lowery’s motion demanding the subpoena of private correspondence, the streaming service has filed an motion to the court to deny the plaintiff’s motion.
Why?
The streaming platform says that it already agreed to disclose documents that the Plaintiff required, on the condition that the parties first enter into a protective order for the disclosure of confidential information. But, instead of taking that offer David Lowery moved the ‘goal posts’ and demanded for the first time ever before filing this motion that Spotify produce documents in the NMPA’s possession rather than just those in Spotify’s possession.
In the motion the streaming platform’s counsel clearly outlines reasons for the court to deny Lowery’s motion and takes the court through their efforts to try and resolve the issue.
Spotify reaches out to Lowery for a ‘meet and confer’.
The motion says that a week after they announced the agreement with NMPA via a press release, Lowery’s counsel sent their counsel a letter seeking “a copy of the settlement agreement… as well as any notifications that have been sent to NMPA members (to the extent Spotify possesses them) regarding their ability to ‘opt-in’ or ‘opt-out’ of the settlement.”
Spotify’s counsel responded to Lowery’s counsel on March 28th correcting their mischaracterization on the NMPA agreement and offering to meet and confer on “confidentiality obligations to third parties implicated” by their request.
Lowery doesn’t respond.
But, there was no response from Lowery’s counsel for 11 days, and when they finally responded on April 8th, they stated their intent to bring the issue to the court’s attention via a motion.
Lowery changes the ‘goal post’.
After this correspondence there were further email exchanges as well as a telephonic meet and confer on April 14th. The streaming platform claims that it was during this meet and confer that Lowery changed his request from seeking notifications to NMPA members “to the extent Spotify possesses them” to seeking “all documents made by either Spotify and/or NMPA to the NMPA members regarding the agreement reached.”
Baseless claims.
The motion concludes with the streaming service saying that the ”plaintiffs’ insinuations that Spotify has made misleading or coercive communications to putative class members or potentially interfered with their rights are baseless,” and for all of the reasons that they have outlined they ”respectfully request” that the Court denies the Plaintiffs’ motion.
The question is, is Spotify being secretive or is Lowery making unsupported claims?
The full motion is below…