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According to this week, Stings former policy bandmate Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland claim that they are entitled to more than $ 2 million of unpaid royalties. That reports The “New York Times”.
Dispute over old agreements
Last month it was announced that Summers and Copeland Sting (bourgeois Gordon Matthew Sumner) sued the High Court in London. They claim that they have not been adequately paid for their contributions to policy hits such as “Every Breath You Take”. The newly published documents provide an insight into the details of the lawsuit. Summers and Copeland claim that they are entitled to an “arrangement fee” for royalties from the “digital utilization” of the policy catalog.
Sting’s lawyers have now submitted a reply. And claim that the front man had not disadvantaged his old colleagues. Rather, the lawsuit is “an illegitimate attempt” to reinterpret an agreement that had signed all three policy members in 2016. Actually, to finally end these disputes about arrangement fees.
Representatives of Copeland, Summers and Sting did not initially respond to inquiries from Rolling Stone.
The conflict basically goes back to 1977 when Copeland and Summers explain that the Police had agreed an oral rights. Accordingly, each band member should receive 15 percent of the income of songs that another wrote. Sting was responsible for most big hits as the main songwriter. These include “Roxanne”, “Message in a Bottle”, “Don’t stood so close to me” and “Every Breath You Take”.
Development of the contracts to this day
Copeland and Summers state that this oral agreement was recorded in 1981. In 1997 the documents were revised after the duo claimed that they had been paid too little over a long period of time. Another agreement followed in 2016. This should regulate how much Sting his ex-colleague has to pay if policy songs are used in films or TV shows.
However, the focus of the current dispute is now in the center of the digital utilization. Say online sales and streaming. While Copeland and Summers claim that they have not received their share, Sting’s lawyers argue that the two were not only “significantly overpaid”. Depending on the interpretation of the 2016 agreement, Sting could not even be legally obliged to pay his colleagues for the use of polic songs online.
A first hearing in the procedure is scheduled for January.