Pandora's filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission from 2011 to 2017 allegedly said that it played spoken-word comedy "absent a specific license from any performing rights association" and could face "significant liability for copyright infringement."Ī rights-management group discussed licensing the works with Pandora starting in 2020, but Pandora ended the discussions last year, the complaints said. They said Pandora knew it was violating their rights. While companies like Pandora often negotiate licenses to music rights with performing-rights organisations like the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, these groups don't license literary works like spoken-word comedy, the comedians said. The lawsuits say Pandora's licenses to the comedians' recordings do not include their underlying jokes. Carlin died in 2008 and Williams in 2014.Įngvall and White are best known for their performances on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, while Clay was a major act in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The lawsuits ask for damages ranging from over $4 million for Williams' estate to nearly $13 million for White.Ĭarlin and Williams were two of the most popular comedians of all time. Williams and Carlin's estates, along with comedians Bill Engvall, Ron White and Andrew Dice Clay, have not received a 'fraction of a penny' from Pandora, they said in five separate federal lawsuits filed in Los Angeles by the same attorney.
Please post comments about this article.The estates of Robin Williams and George Carlin sued Sirius XM's Pandora Media Inc on Monday, claiming the online music service owes royalties for streaming their material millions of times. Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York. "The world is a big theater-in-the round as far as I'm concerned, and I'd love to watch it spin itself into oblivion," he said. I don't believe in this country, I don't believe in religion, or a god, and I don't believe in all these man-made institutional ideas," he told Reuters in a 2001 interview.Ĭarlin told Playboy in 2005 that he looked forward to an afterlife where he could watch the decline of civilization on a "heavenly CNN."
"I don't have any beliefs or allegiances. It will give you a better idea as to why I believe he was, essentially, a poster-boy nihilist - that is, a person who fundamentally has no values and actively seeks to destroy values as such: In turn, he comes off as man-hating as a radical environmentalist:īelow is an excerpt from an AP article on Carlin after he died last week. Notice that, when he puts himself in the position of Mother Earth in the video clip below, he says that he “dreams” for a virus like AIDS as Earth’s defense against man. But, actually, this was only his ostensible view of environmentalism. Apparently, Carlin never let go of the idea of Original Sin - that man is born corrupt by his nature - that I’m sure he learned in Catholic school.Ĭarlin’s man-hatred is clearly evident in his views on environmentalism, in which he disparages the green movement, not because he (correctly) regards it as anti-man, but because he primarily sees it (incorrectly) as a movement to make life better for man on Earth. Despite being an atheist who understood the evils of religion, this view was part of his broader perspective that human beings are evil. Here’s a pretty standard routine on what he had to say about it:īut mostly I could not watch Carlin because he spewed a seething hatred toward man as such. For example, watch this classic routine on airline safety:Ĭarlin was also great at demonstrating the absurdities and contradictions of religion. The late comedian George Carlin was at his best when he dissected the English language and the ways that people misused it.
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