This Will Destroy You sues ‘I Am Second’ for stealing music

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If you’ve seen a movie or watched TV (especially a sporting event) in recent years, you’re quite familiar with Texas band This Will Destroy You, whose moody music can be heard in Moneyball, World War Z, myriad year-end highlight reels, an episode of CSI: Miami, Olympics and Super Bowl broadcasts and the trailer for The Taking of Pellham 123. For starters.

And then there are those I Am Second campaign videos in which famous people — Josh Hamilton, Tony Dungy, Mike Huckabee, Janine Turner and other athletes and actors and politicians — talk about their relationships with God and “provide insight into dealing with typical struggles of everyday living,” per its website. Hamilton’s confession very clearly features the song “Quiet” off the band’s self-released EP Young Mountain. Former minister Nate Larkin’s uses “They Move on Tracks of Never-Ending Light” off This Will Destroy You’s eponymous full-lengther. Quarterback Landry Jones shares his story over “There are Some Remedies Worse Than the Disease.”

Raymond Brown, Jeremy Galindo and Christopher King — collectively known as This Will Destroy You — say there are many, many more where those came from, not just on the web but on DVDs that have been made commercially available. The band also claims that I Am Second and Plano-based e3 Partners Ministry (which is behind the campaign) are using those songs without permission, according to a federal lawsuit filed in Dallas on Friday.

“Defendants did not seek, much less pay for, licenses from Plaintiffs,” says the suit. “Instead, they appropriated Plaintiffs’ works, in whole, made them available to the world on the Internet, and sold videos using them through both online and brick-and-mortar retailers. To this day, despite e3’s extraordinary economic performance, Defendants have paid nothing to Plaintiffs for such uses or sales, which are ongoing. Had Defendants, as the law requires, come to Plaintiffs ahead of time seeking the licenses for the multiple uses they have made of Plaintiffs’ multiple works — involving years of use, global Internet audiences, and extended run-times — the licensing fees, had Plaintiffs been willing to license to Defendants, would have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not the millions.”

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