Black’s Friday video in legal battle

The song reached No. 58 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, was covered by Justin Bieber, and then jumped the shark when it was performed on Glee.

Black’s Friday then started its descent towards a future edition of Trivial Pursuit, but now has gotten a momentary reprieve thanks to a take-down notice.

The dispute has been going on for months and is more about the contracts that young musicians sign before they hit it big.

In Black’s case, she seems to have created a vanity recording by making a deal with Ark Music Records to use its studio to record her song. After the song exploded, Ark Music wanted to capitalise. And that’s when it starts to get interesting.

In March, Black’s lawyers sent a letter to Ark Music, accusing the company of copyright infringement and unlawful exploitation of her publicity rights. Specifically, Black says she never got the master recordings allegedly due to her by contract and that Ark hadn’t attained the necessary rights to advertise her as an exclusive Ark recording artist and commercially exploit the song in derivatives like ringtones.

Most bona fide record labels would have taken care of such matters rather easily. But if Ark was really more like a recording studio for hire rather than a recording label, it likely gave little thought to how it would support Black’s career through publicity and marketing expenditures. Instead, Ark took a few hundred dollars from Black’s mother to let the 13-year-old record a song, probably without the slightest expectation of any further reward.

Now that the song has hit it big, the equation has obviously changed, and the parties are fussing over who owns which rights, which will help determine the slicing of the royalty pie. If the parties don’t come to an agreement, only a court’s inspection of the contract will settle the matter.