In late March 2013, PMC and Prometheus Global Media settled the 2011 copyright-infringement lawsuit that had defined the public-facing posture of the Deadline-vs-THR rivalry for 18 months. Jay Penske’s company announced the deal at the close of a busy week that had also seen the launch of Variety’s new weekly print edition. The settlement marked the end of the legal phase. The corporate consolidation phase — which would eventually fold THR into PMC entirely — took another seven years.
Then
The PMC-vs-Prometheus copyright case had been filed in September 2011, alleging that THR had systematically rewritten Deadline scoops within minutes of publication and that TVLine and HollywoodReporter.com had suspiciously similar templates. The case had been the highest-stakes public legal dispute in trade-press history. Section 34 of the complaint — the itemized 30 instances of alleged Deadline-to-THR repackaging — had been the most-discussed exhibit in the trade ecosystem.
The settlement was announced quietly. Terms were not disclosed. Both sides issued bland statements. The original FishbowlLA framing noted the timing: PMC had launched Variety’s new weekly print edition that same week — a substantial editorial-and-production undertaking that should have been the splashy media-press story of the week — and the settlement announcement landed at the end of a slow Passover/Good Friday news cycle, which read as PMC deliberately undermining its own potential headline impact on the lawsuit close.
The framing was that PMC had moved on from the trade-press public-fight model. With Variety and Deadline both inside the same corporate house, with The Hollywood Reporter still nominally a Prometheus property but visibly weakening as a standalone competitor, the public legal posturing no longer fit PMC’s strategic interests. The settlement closed out the legal dimension of the 2011-2013 trade-press fight.
Now
The settlement was the practical end of the public Deadline-vs-THR rivalry as a published narrative. The two trades continued to compete editorially through the mid-2010s, but the public legal-and-correspondence-war mode that had defined the 2010-2013 period largely went away. PMC consolidated Variety under its ownership, expanded into additional entertainment-publication acquisitions (Indiewire, Rolling Stone, Sportico, and others), and built toward the eventual May 2020 acquisition of The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard from Eldridge Industries.
The 2020 THR/Billboard deal completed the corporate consolidation that the 2013 settlement had foreshadowed. PMC is now the parent company of Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Indiewire, Rolling Stone, Vibe, and a long roster of additional entertainment-and-lifestyle publications. The trade-press rivalry that the 2011 copyright complaint was prosecuting has been formally resolved by acquisition.
The Section 34 itemization in the original complaint — those 30 alleged instances of Deadline-to-THR repackaging — has become a documented case study in the academic literature on entertainment-trade-press attribution norms. Jay Penske has continued as PMC’s CEO through the entire interval and is now one of the most powerful figures in the U.S. entertainment-publishing space. Nikki Finke died in October 2023. The trade-press world the 2013 settlement closed out is, in 2026, a very different ecosystem — corporate, consolidated, newsletter-supplemented, and no longer organized around the kind of public lawsuit-driven rivalry the case had defined.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2013 snapshot