Eminem’s longtime publishing company, Eight Mile Style, isn’t backing down from Big Tech—it’s suiting up for war.
In a blistering new court filing, the Detroit-based publisher accused Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms of wielding its vast wealth to “crush” smaller competitors while allegedly profiting from the unlicensed use of Eminem’s catalog across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The filing marks Eight Mile’s official counterstrike against Meta’s attempt to dismiss its sweeping copyright lawsuit.
The company, co-owned by Eminem and his longtime collaborators Jeff and Mark Bass, claims Meta deliberately uploaded 243 of the rapper’s compositions into its in-app music libraries without permission. Eight Mile’s lawyers, Richard Busch and Howard Hertz, frame the fight as an uneven but deliberate one — a David vs. Goliath clash between Detroit’s most famous lyricist and Silicon Valley’s social media empire. The filing paints Meta as a “corporate juggernaut” using delay tactics to exhaust smaller rights holders. “Meta may effortlessly start and then endure a war of attrition in order to force a smaller opposing party into submission,” Busch wrote.
The lawsuit argues that Meta directly infringed by storing, reproducing, and distributing Eminem’s songs to billions of users without a license.