Sony Music Entertainment has settled its copyright infringement lawsuit against the University of Southern California, closing a case that was notable not just for the legal stakes involved but for how preventable the whole situation was.
The lawsuit, filed in March 2025, alleged that USC repeatedly used Sony-owned recordings without permission across 283 social media posts on its athletics accounts. The songs included recordings by Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, AC/DC, Harry Styles, Usher, and Mariah Carey. Sony had sought statutory damages of $150,000 per infraction — the maximum under U.S. copyright law — putting the potential exposure north of $42 million. Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
According to a court order filed March 26 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge Gregory H. Woods conditionally discontinued the case after both parties confirmed a settlement had been reached. The parties have 60 days to submit a formal Stipulation of Settlement and Dismissal. If neither side takes action within that window, the order will be deemed a final discontinuance with prejudice.
What USC Actually Did
The detail that makes this case worth paying attention to isn’t the settlement — it’s the timeline. Sony said it first notified USC of the unauthorized use as far back as June 2021. Then again in January 2023. Then again in July 2024. According to Sony’s original complaint, USC kept posting infringing content after each notification.
“Rather than cease this infringing conduct, USC chose to flaunt copyright law, repeatedly posting new videos to the USC Social Media Pages that use Sony Music sound recordings knowingly and willfully and without permission,” Sony wrote in its complaint.
That’s not an accidental oversight. That’s an institution that understood it was using music it didn’t have rights to and kept doing it anyway. USC’s athletics operation reported $212 million in athletic revenue for the 2022-2023 school year and more than $7 billion in total operating revenues for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2024. The resources to license music properly were never the issue.
During the litigation, USC did not contest the direct copyright infringement claim. It did successfully have Sony’s secondary infringement claims dismissed, which likely gave it some leverage in the settlement negotiations. But the core facts were never really in dispute.
Why This Pattern Keeps Repeating
The USC case doesn’t exist in isolation. This is part of a deliberate enforcement push by major labels targeting businesses and institutions that treat social media music as a free resource.
In 2024, Sony settled a similar lawsuit against Marriott Hotels over what it called “rampant” unauthorized use of its music in promotional posts. APM Music, a production music house jointly owned by Sony and Universal Music Group, sued both Johnson & Johnson and the American Hockey League last year over comparable allegations. UMG separately sued Brinker International, the parent company of Chili’s, over unlicensed music in social media ads.
The pattern is consistent: large organizations with significant marketing budgets using popular music in social content without licensing it, often for years, until a label files suit. The underlying assumption seems to be that the risk of enforcement is low enough to ignore — and for a long time, it largely was. That’s changing. It’s worth noting that the labels pursuing these cases are the same ones who recently lost a $1 billion piracy ruling at the Supreme Court against Cox Communications — a reminder that rights enforcement doesn’t always go the labels’ way, and they’re fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.
