Legendary producer, Dr. Dre, and his business parter/Interscope Records CEO, Jimmy Iovine, are probably pissed as hell after losing an incredibly expensive lawsuit. As we recently reported, they’ve been legally battling their former Beats by Dre business partner, Steven Lamar, after he claimed they jacked him out of major profits from sales of Beats by Dre headphones. Dre and Iovine have now learned the hard way, that a deal is a deal.
The Millions They Have To Pay
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine have just been ordered to cough of a whopping $25MILLION! Can we say, Cha-CHING?!! It looks like their main man, Steven Lamar, done came UP:
Via The Blast: According to the jury verdict sheet obtained by The Blast, Steven Lamar was awarded $25,247,350 in total damages for the versions of the Beats headphones which he was owed royalties. The jury broke down the damages by awarding him over $7 million for the Studio 2/Remastered headphones, $14 million for the Studio 2 Wireless version and another $2 million for the Studio 3 cans.
Well…maybe Dre and Iovine can look at the bright side of this, at least $25M’s is a lot better than the $100million Lamar was originally seeking…
Backstory Of Why They’re Being Sued For $100M’s
If you missed our prior coverage n why Lamar took his business partners to court, here’s what we reported.
Nearly 10 years after Beats by Dre hit the market, Lamar recently sued the former N.W.A. pioneer and Iovine for $100million. In court docs, Lamar claims to have presented Dre and Jimmy with the idea for their highly successful Apple Music Beats by Dre headphones. Lamar said they were now trying to cut him out of the agreement they arranged, by allegedly finding a loophole to go forgo paying him.
Via Billboard: Lamar is suing Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, Jimmy Iovine, and Beats Electronics. Lamar alleges being the one back in 2006 to propose to Dre and Iovine a line of celebrity-endorsed headphones based on a design by Robert Brunner, a renowned industrial designer.
But the parties had a falling out in the early years, and Dre and Iovine sued Lamar for breaching contract. This prior lawsuit then led to a settlement where Lamar relinquished rights in exchange for a four percent royalty on every headphone sold by Monster and its affiliates. After the settlement, Beats released new headphone models and began paying a two percent royalty to Brunner until sometime in 2014 when Beats bought out Brunner’s interest. Dre and Iovine would later sell Beats to Apple for $3 billion.
The big question in the case is whether Lamar is due royalties for the later derivative versions of Beats headphones or whether the defendants fulfilled its obligations by merely paying him for the first headphone model.
Prior to now, a judge had tossed Lamar’s case because he/she felt there was not evidence enough to go to trial. In Sept. 2016 though, an appeals court judge deemed that the wording of the agreement between Lamar, Dre, and Iovine was too “ambiguous” to fully exclude Lamar from any profits from altered versions of the original Beats by Dre headphones. Therefore, the three parties are now in a jury trial, pleading their sides of the case in a California court.
They Were Clueless?
According to Billboard, Dre and Jimmy Iovine claim they were clueless of how successful the headphones would be at the time of the agreement and therefore had no way of predicting there would be a follow up version of the headphones to hit the market. However, Lamar came to the trial ready…dude presented a Power Point presentation documenting his, Jimmy’s and Dr. Dre’s early days together, in which Lamar raised the possibility of future different models of the headphones, as well as their future collaboration on a “line of headphones”…not just one version. Thus, here they are today,
