A federal judge in Tennessee has ruled that Spotify is not liable to pay unpaid royalties to Eminem’s publisher, despite allegedly failing to secure the proper license to host his songs on their site. The judge accepted Spotify’s claim that royalty collector Kobalt Music Group would have been responsible for paying any outstanding royalties, not the streaming service.

Pitchfork writes that Judge Aleta A. Trauger then suggested that Eight Mile Style LLC, the publisher that brought the lawsuit forward in 2019, allegedly kept quiet about the licensing rights in a “strategic” attempt to produce a copyright infringement payout from Spotify rather than resolving the issue as new problems came to light.

Trauger further elaborated in her opinion “While Spotify’s handling of composer copyrights appears to have been seriously flawed, any right to recover damages based on those flaws belongs to those innocent rights holders who were genuinely harmed, not ones who, like Eight Mile Style, had every opportunity to set things right and simply chose not to do so for no apparent reason, other than that being the victim of infringement pays better than being an ordinary licensor.”

Trauger’s opinion, posted on August 15, noted that Bridgeport Music, an affiliate of Eight Mile Style, had received the correct license in 2009, meaning that despite Kobalt’s responsibility to collect royalties, the agency had no legal right to license the songs in the United States and Canada.

Representatives for Eminem–not considered a formal party in this case–offered no comment on this decision.