At issue was a recording contract negotiated in 1998, before the era of digital downloads. Mathers’s lawyers at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin argued that downloads should be covered by a provision in the contract that set a 50 percent royalty rate for ““masters licensed by [the recording companies]…to others for their manufacture and sale of records or for any other uses.” This provision, they argued, “fits these digital downloads like a glove.” In contrast, the recording companies maintained that Mathers should be paid the same royalty rate on downloads that he receives on compact disk sales, which ranges from 12 to 20 percent. The named plaintiff in this case is Mathers’s former production company, FBT Productions.
Howard Rice maintained that Los Angeles federal district court judge Philip Gutierrez had erred by allowing a jury to decide how the contract should be interpreted. ( We wrote about that trial here.) They argued that the interpretation was a matter of law that should have been decided by the trial judge, and not by the jury. Howard Rice’s opening appellate brief is here, and its reply brief is here. We were not able to get the defendants’ briefs.
