George Lopez is all for getting his comedy out into the world by any means possible — but he claims streaming giant Pandora never even bothered to license his comedy specials before streaming them … which is why he’s dragging them to court.
The legendary comic just filed suit against the radio streaming giant, claiming they’ve exploited his copyrighted material — namely, his standup from 2 different specials — without first getting a proper license to distribute it.
According to the docs, obtained by TMZ, George alleges Pandora has been streaming upwards of 37 works of his contained in 2001’s “Right Now Right Now” and 2003’s “Team Leader,” which are 2 of his stand-up specials that became albums.
There are 18 chapters on the former, and 19 on the latter … so essentially, George is saying Pandora’s ripped off the entirety of each special and streamed it without his permission … and, perhaps more importantly, without paying him.
You can tell he’s pretty fired up about this too, because he’s got a fiery introduction to this suit.
His attorneys write, “Pandora not only did not obtain any license for the Works but admitted that it did not do so in SEC filings, and admitted that it would very likely face copyright infringement liability as a result. But Pandora did what most goliaths do: it decided it would infringe now to ensure it had this very valuable intellectual property on its platform to remain competitive, and deal with the consequences later. Later is now.”
George wants an accounting of all profits made from streaming his stuff and is looking to collect big damages. In the alternative, he’s looking for statutory damages totaling $5.5 million for the alleged infringements.
We reached out to Pandora for comment … so far, no word back.