[wilsonnb3]

> In January 2018, shortly prior to a pending trial, Live Nation settled the lawsuit for $110 million, and also acquired the remaining intellectual property not sold to WMG for an undisclosed amount.

It sounds like after the sale of the part of the company not involved in the lawsuit to WMG, they basically had no reason to keep the IP so they sold it to whoever wanted it.

Which happened to be Live Nation/Ticket Master

[photoGrant]

Which would personally tell me that the ethics and hatred towards Ticket Master was only skin deep. As soon as the money spoke.... Sigh.

[sfink]

That's not really how these things tend to go.

More likely: you start out with a smallish company trying to compete with a behemoth. You do well for a while, but as soon as you become an active threat, you start hearing a lot of "we'd love to work with you, but we just signed an exclusive deal with the behemoth that gives us access to a lot of high value stuff they won't allow otherwise." Your company is starved of revenue and dwindles. Eventually you decide to sue.

That gets real messy real fast, since no matter how strong your case is, you're going up against an entity with deep pockets to keep lots of lawyers tangling things up. You don't have the cash to fund both an expensive litigation and keep paying your employees to run the actual business that is being slowly starved of oxygen by the same monopolistic practices that you're suing for and can prove are happening.

The behemoth's objective now is to make you go away with the least total cost to them. A large settlement alone would not result in you going away; if you manage to hang on for that long by borrowing against everything you own, then the cash infusion could revitalize your company enough to compete for real. But if the behemoth gets your IP, the threat to them is mostly neutralized (assuming you retain the rights to use your own IP, you'd be competing on a supposedly even playing field, but with a gorilla that can do everything you can do and set prices just low enough to finish starving you out.) So the behemoth offers you a sweet deal: a large lump of cash in exchange for handing over the IP and going away. You will try to stand on principle and refuse for as long as you can, but the writing is on the wall. And your employees' families are hungry. How willing are you to hurt them in order to hurt the behemoth?

So sure, money is speaking, but it's not saying what you think it is: it's not whispering enticements.

It is yelling threats.

[I know nothing about this specific situation, but I have seen this play out in others.]

[photoGrant]

Truly, I appreciate this angle and I gave the benefit of the doubt to the author -- but to start a company by suing TicketMaster instead of competing on good faith... And to eventually sell your IP to them in order to help them be the behemoth you hate... It just doesn't make sense to me.