After five years The legal dispute between Spotify and Eminem’s publisher Eight Mile Style has ended – and thanks to a legal loophole, the streaming giant has been released from liability.

In 2019, Eight Mile Style sued Spotify, accusing the service of acting “deceptively” by pretending to have the necessary licenses to stream more than 240 songs from the rapper’s catalog. Only some of the music falls under the rights ownership of the publisher, which uses Kobalt Music Group as a royalty collection agency. In the lawsuit, Eight Mile Style demanded nearly $40 million and claimed it had not received payments for billions of Spotify streams.

This week, a judge in Tennessee ruled that while Spotify did not in fact have a license to stream the hundreds of relevant Eminem songs, the streaming service was not liable for the lost royalties. The decision comes in the wake of Spotify’s original response to the lawsuit it filed in 2020 claiming Kobalt Music Group was to blame. The service said it was licensed by the collection agency to “reproduce and distribute the compositions,” according to a third-party lawsuit.

Tennessee State Judge Aleta A. Trauger agreed with the ruling that even if Spotify had been found guilty of streaming Eminem’s catalog without the proper license, any penalties imposed would have hit Kobalt Music Group for failing to collect royalties on Eight Mile Style’s behalf.

“Although Spotify’s handling of composers’ copyrights appears to have serious deficiencies, any right to compensation for these deficiencies belongs to the innocent rights holders who were actually harmed,” Judge Trauter said, according to Music business worldwide. “Not those like Eight Mile Style who had every chance to make things right and just decided not to do so for no apparent reason other than that it pays better to be the victim of copyright infringement than to be a regular licensor.”

Because Spotify cannot be held liable for damages, it was ruled that Kobalt will likely have to pay to cover certain attorneys’ fees and costs in the five-year-old litigation.

Representatives for Spotify and Eminem did not immediately respond to Rolling StonePlease leave a comment.