CNN must face the music on alleged copyright infringement

The self-proclaimed “most trusted name in news” cannot be trusted to access songs it has used in its news segments without obtaining a license, according to a lawsuit filed by a production company.

As reported by Rolling Stone magazine, the $17 million lawsuit was filed by Freeplay Music, a music library company that has 50,000 songs in its library available for licensing for use in television broadcasts, advertisements and YouTube videos.

According to the newspaper, which obtained access to the lawsuit, several CNN outposts around the world treated Freeplay’s library as “their own personal cookie jar,” allegedly using over 115 copyrighted works in more than 280 segments over the past few years.

Freeplay, which said in the lawsuit that “it notified CNN of this infringement, but its letter was ignored,”

; accuses CNN of “willful copyright infringement,” Rolling Stone reported.

As the suit states, these are “no lesser uses” because “the music library has been used to create and enhance the CNN brand in these segments … to create the mood and feel” that the producers “intended to convey.”