Bob Dylan has won a verdict on the estate’s lawsuit against Jacques Levy in January that claimed ownership of more than 35 percent of the songs Levy and Dylan wrote together. In documents viewed by Pitchfork, Judge Barry Ostrager of the New York Supreme Court ruled that the agreement signed between Dylan and Levy in 1975 clarified that Levy had no ownership of the material and that “Levy’s redress rights are defined and express” by the terms of the agreement Dylan’s attorney Orin Snyder said in a statement that they were “satisfied” with the decision.
Levy wrote songs from Dylan’s 1976 album Desire (including “Hurricane” and “Isis”). The lawsuit claimed $ 7.25 million. Dylan sold the music publishing rights to his entire songwriting catalog to Universal Music Publishing in December 2020, reportedly for more than $ 300 million. Levy’s widow Claudia then filed the lawsuit the next month, claiming the estate was entitled to a portion of Dylan’s profit from the sale of the 10 songs in the catalog that Jacques Levy helped write. When the lawsuit was filed, Snyder said in a statement that the “lawsuit is a sad attempt to unfairly profit from the recent catalog sale.”
Dylan recently announced volume 16 of his long-running bootleg series Springtime in New York, which focuses on Dylan’s work from 1980 to 1985. Earlier this month, he streamed Shadow Kingdom with “renditions of songs from his extensive and renowned work”. Created specifically for this event. ”The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, containing more than 100,000 artifacts from Dylan’s career, opens in May 2022.
Read “Bob Dylan recasts his old selfs in Ghostly Concert Film Shadow Kingdom” on the field.
