Blue Spike and Warner Music Settle Their Patent Infringement Battle — As the Blue Spike-Universal Music Dispute Rages On

Warner Music Group and Blue Spike have disclosed a settlement in principle in their years-running patent legal battle. Photo Credit: Cytonn Photography

Warner Music Group (WMG) has hammered out a settlement in the years-old patent complaint filed against it by Blue Spike. But the latter company’s separate legal action against Universal Music Group (UMG) is still in full swing. The WMG-Blue Spike settlement came to light in a recent dismissal order from the presiding judge. We first covered the underlying suit (and that levied by Blue Spike against UMG) two years ago to the day.

In short, the Texas-based plaintiff, which per its website possesses north of 100 patents, accused WMG of infringing on four data-protection patents under a Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) partnership. That partnership was announced in 2016 and sought to deliver HD audio to listeners.

Without diving too far into the specifics at hand, Blue Spike played a part in pioneering digital watermarking and explored early software initiatives in collaboration with the majors, per founder Scott Moskowitz’s LinkedIn profile.

Returning to the settlement, a couple years of intense litigating later, Judge Jesse M. Furman in the aforementioned order acknowledged the parties had “advised that all claims asserted herein have been settled in principle.”Consequently, the court dismissed the suit without costs, nixed all pending motions, and set a 60-day deadline for Blue Spike to reopen the action should the settlement fail to officially wrap. Terms of said settlement haven’t been revealed publicly.

Also as highlighted at the outset, though, a resolution between Blue Spike and Warner Music hasn’t been accompanied by a settlement in the former’s similar-but-separate patent action against UMG.

As described by Blue Spike in a May of 2024 order seeking a 180-day extension for all deadlines, things aren’t going as smoothly in that courtroom confrontation.“Over the course of this litigation,” Blue Spike and its counsel wrote, “Plaintiffs have diligently attempted to obtain from” Universal Music “the most basic information concerning UMG’s use of the Master Quality Assurance (‘MQA’) encryption system.

“With less than a month remaining before the close of fact discovery,” the filing entities proceeded, “UMG has for the first time disclosed that it has virtually no information about MQA, and that the relevant information is in the hands of third parties, some of whom it has yet to disclose and others of whom are overseas.”

June saw the presiding judge approve the extension motion, and a scheduling conference is now teed up for later this month.

Hardly letting up in the interim, Blue Spike kicked off August with a demand to examine on September 5th “the computer which UMG currently uses to encrypt its files in the MQA format, or in the alternative a computer which has previously been used to encrypt its files in the MQA format.”

It’s unclear whether the desired inspection actually occurred – the docket hadn’t received a related update at the time of writing – but especially with the scheduling conference set, additional details will likely emerge in the near future.