Photo Credit: Dima Solomin
Meta has officially moved to dismiss the infringement suit filed against it by Eminem publisher Eight Mile Style (EMS), claiming, among other things, that the action “is remarkably short on specifics.”
The Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp parent just recently fired off its dismissal motion, with the complaint itself having arrived at May’s end. As we reported then, Eight Mile has accused Meta of infringing on some 243 Eminem compositions through the mentioned platforms.
Per the suit, the purported infringement concerns the alleged storage of the relevant songs in Meta’s music libraries and an alleged failure to address user uploads incorporating those tracks.
Another important angle: Eight Mile maintains that Meta knew or should have known that its (Meta’s) prior licensing pacts with Audiam excluded Eminem’s body of work.
(“Although Audiam did not have the authority to enter into any license on behalf of Eight Mile Style, Meta tried to negotiate, unsuccessfully, an Eight Mile Style license as part of the first Audiam license. Meta knew that no license was granted by Audiam or Eight Mile Style as part of those negotiations,” the suit emphasizes here.)
Putting the Meta-Audiam agreements on the backburner for a moment, the defendant says Eight Mile’s secondary infringement claims “are unsupported by even a single example of user-based infringement.”
“It’s not enough to claim that unidentified compositions were infringed somewhere on Meta’s services at some unknown time; without a modicum of support identifying any—let alone ‘rampant’—user infringement, Eight Mile’s secondary infringement claims cannot get off the ground,” the legal text spells out.
“Eight Mile has failed to adequately allege that even a single Meta user engaged in even a single instance of direct infringement,” another section states. “The Complaint says nothing at all about any specific users, posts, dates, or infringed compositions.”
Furthermore, the “imprecise” suit is allegedly light on particular examples of direct infringement as well.
“Eight Mile’s claim for direct infringement fails at the outset because it does not sufficiently allege that any defendant actually infringed its compositions. … [F]or over 99 percent of the works, it makes no specific allegations at all—not the identity of the purportedly infringing copies, nor which defendant made the copies, nor when any alleged copying occurred,” the dismissal motion reads.
As for the aforesaid Audiam-Meta talks, the latter entity says “Eight Mile’s account of the 2020 negotiations is incomplete.” (In the end, those negotiations produced a pair of licensing tie-ups running two years apiece.)
“While Eight Mile insists that Audiam ‘did not have the authority’ to negotiate on its behalf, documents incorporated by the Complaint say otherwise,” Meta’s motion indicates. “In a May 2025 letter, Audiam confirmed that ‘prior to any agreement being in place,’ an Audiam representative had told Meta in 2020 that ‘Audiam was authorized to represent EMS in its direct negotiation with Meta.’
“Audiam told EMS that it was negotiating with Meta,” the motion continues, “and EMS even provided Audiam with ‘a list of compositions that EMS claimed to own.’”
With that, Meta is asking the court to toss the increasingly convoluted action altogether. DMN reached out to SESAC, the owner of non-party Audiam, for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response.
