State Champ Radio copyright infringement
Universal Music Group (UMG) is facing a lawsuit that claims a 1992 Mary J. Blige hit featured an unlicensed sample from a 1973 funk song that’s famous for being sampled in dozens of other tracks, including releases from Biggie and Tupac as well as a recent Doja Cat tune.
In a complaint filed Thursday (April 4) in Manhattan federal court, Tuff City Records accused Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) of copyright infringement over Blige’s “Real Love,” which spent 31 weeks on the Hot 100 in 1992 and reached a peak of No. 7 on the chart.
The allegedly-copied song? “Impeach the President” by the Honey Drippers — a legendary piece of hip-hop source material with a drum track that’s also been sampled or interpolated by Run-DMC, Dr. Dre and many others. Most recently, it was featured in Doja Cat’s 2023 track “Can’t Wait.”
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In the complaint, Tuff City’s attorneys say they have “advised defendant repeatedly of the presence of the uncleared sample” in “Real Love” but that Universal has done nothing about it.
“Defendant has repeatedly refused to engage plaintiff in substantive negotiations to rectify the foregoing, let alone agreed to compensate Plaintiff for the past infringement or on an ongoing basis,” wrote Tuff City’s attorney Hillel Parness in the complaint.
Blige herself is not named in the lawsuit nor accused of any wrongdoing.
In a bizarre wrinkle, Tuff City claims that UMG Recordings — a subsidiary of UMG and the owner of the master to “Real Love” — has already reached an agreement regarding the use of the uncleared sample on the sound recording. But they say the music giant’s publishing arm has refused to do the same as it relates to the underlying composition.
“Defendant’s refusal to cooperate with plaintiff is difficult to reconcile with the fact that plaintiff reached an agreement with UMG Recordings,” Tuff City’s attorneys write.
Tuff City, which owns a large catalog of old songs, is no stranger to copyright litigation. Over the past fifteen years, the company has sued over tracks by Jay-Z, Beastie Boys, Christina Aguilera, Frank Ocean and others, typically alleging that they featured unlicensed samples or interpolations.
That process has not always gone smoothly. In 2014, a judge dismissed a case over Jay-Z’s “Run This Town” on the grounds that any alleged sample was “barely perceptible” after multiple listens. In 2018, another judge ordered Tuff City to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees spent by Beastie Boys defending a case that was “clearly without merit.”
The new case is also not the first time Tuff City has sued over “Impeach the President.” Way back in 1991, the company sued Sony Music and Def Jam over claims that producer Marley Marl had illegally sampled the track on LL Cool J tracks “Around the Way Girl” and “Six Minutes of Pleasure.”
At the time, the lawsuit was a novel legal attack on sampling, which had long been at the core of hip-hop but had rarely involved paying for licenses or seeking authorization. In a 1992 article, the New York Times warned that Tuff City’s lawsuit over “Impeach the President” could fundamentally change hip hop, forcing rappers and producers to clear every element used in their albums — a formidable idea at the time.
“A single rap album can include dozens of samples, from single drumbeats to full musical phrases,” the New York Times article reads. “Finding the copyright owners, negotiating fees or royalties and gaining legal clearance is time consuming and can add tens of thousands of dollars to the production costs.”
Tuff City’s case eventually settled on confidential terms, but it proved to be a sign of things to come. In the years since, federal courts have ruled that nearly any amount of sampling of sound recordings counts as copyright infringement. As a result, labels and artists today attempt to clear almost any direct sampling in their songs and will typically remove those elements if a deal can’t be reached.
Of course, Blige’s “Real Love” came out just months after Tuff City filed its case against LL Cool J, and well before such practices had become universal. It’s unclear why the company waited more than 30 years to sue over it, but copyright law has a so-called “rolling” statute of limitations that allows for such long-delayed actions.
A spokesman for UMG did not immediately return a request for comment.
The estate of Donna Summer filed a copyright lawsuit against Kanye West on Tuesday (Feb. 27), accusing him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).” Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In a complaint filed in Los Angeles […]
During its first week of release, Vultures 1, the first full-length release from the artist formerly known as Kanye West and singer Ty Dolla $ign, changed distributors, was pulled from Apple Music temporarily and got cut by a song to ward off a possible copyright infringement issue brought up by Donna Summer’s estate. So far, the story of the album may be as interesting as the music itself — and Billboard has reported that some samples remain uncleared, which suggests that this could only be the beginning.
Like many hip-hop artists, Ye makes music that involves both snippets of other recordings (samples) and passages of other songs that are re-recorded (interpolations, which confusingly are often referred to as samples as well). Samples generally require a license from the owner of the recording and the underlying composition, while interpolations only require the latter. West seems to have cleared some of the samples and interpolations he’s used, but not all of them.
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There was a time when that would have been dangerous. When the music business was dominated by physical media, rights holders whose work was used without a license had the legal leverage they needed to take most, or even all, of the rights to a song, as ABKCO famously did with the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” which sampled a version of the ABKCO-controlled Rolling Stones song “The Last Time.” The Verve’s only other choice would have been to destroy all existing copies of the album it was on and stop promoting what became its breakthrough hit.
West won’t face those issues, partly because no single song on Vultures 1 depends as much on one sample or interpolation, and partly because the nature of streaming means that most music — most art, really — isn’t ever really final anymore. When the estate of Donna Summer said that West had used elements of “I Feel Love” without a license for “Good (Don’t Die),” the song was simply pulled offline. Uncleared samples could be re-recorded, if West can get permission from a publisher but not a label, or simply replaced by other musical elements. Albums can evolve for legal reasons as well as artistic ones.
This is an extreme example of what seems like a general trend, as is the Travis Scott album Utopia which Billboard recently reported has its own issues with songwriting credits and royalty splits. In this case, Scott worked with producers and co-writers but didn’t finalize all of the relevant agreements. Scott is far from the only artist to deal with this issue. Here, too, Scott’s collaborators could sue — although this would be a foolish move since many of them depend on his star power to market their work and the nature of streaming blunts potential legal threats.
In both cases, the balance of power in a licensing system that initially gave more leverage to songwriters and other rights holders is now tilting toward recording artists, especially powerful ones. That could be bad for other creators, because the less money they make, the more tempted they are to take any deal they can get to keep money coming in. In most cases, delays in negotiation and payment are just that — arranging all the co-writing deals gets very complicated because there’s only so much credit, and thus royalties, to go around. But the way the leverage shifts toward artists doesn’t exactly inspire their teams to deal with this as fast as possible.
The same kind of pressure doesn’t apply to publishers that control interpolation rights for older songs, but it’s important to remember that this money, too, goes to creators — often on better terms than streaming revenue does. Financial issues aside, creators also have the right to decide if they want to be associated with other creators, just as they have the right to turn down advertisement opportunities. In West’s case, Ozzy Osbourne turned down West’s request to sample a live version of “Iron Man,” which he wrote with his bandmates in Black Sabbath, because of West’s antisemitic comments. So West simply went ahead and sampled his own song, “Hell of a Life,” which uses the same riff. Osbourne should be able to prevent that — his team didn’t comment on West’s use of this other song — and he may decide to try.
The music business needs a code of conduct to deal with this situation before it gets any worse. If it’s overly strict to require artists to sort out all rights before the release of an album, a voluntary code could mandate having rough agreements in place or requiring final ones to be completed within a certain amount of time. The idea would be to give artists the time they need to sort out rights issues, within reasonable deadlines that will keep negotiations relatively equitable. If artists can’t figure out the credits issues that get their collaborators paid, maybe they shouldn’t submit their music for the Grammy Awards — which are voted on by other creators — or even be allowed to. The idea isn’t to penalize anyone, just to create a hard deadline.
None of this would address Osbourne’s issue with West, which I can’t help but take more seriously than the others. Think about it: The No. 1 album in the country this week is by an antisemite who has praised Adolph Hitler and the Nazis and will soon headline a major festival. (In December, West apologized for his comments with a statement in Hebrew but it’s hard to know how seriously to take that, considering that this album has a line about how “I just f—ed a Jewish b—-.”) I think it’s possible to enjoy good art made by bad people, and I assume that most people listening to Vultures 1 don’t agree with the crazy things West has said. At the same time, it feels wrong to write about the copyright issues West faces without acknowledging how hateful he has been. Presumably, West will find ways to license the snippets of music he uses on this album or else replace them. But as he faces pushback from creators and rights holders who are reluctant to be associated with him, as Osbourne is, perhaps he’ll begin a more serious effort to make up for some of the awful things he’s said.
A federal appeals court has overturned a massive $1 billion copyright verdict won by the major record labels against internet service provider Cox Communications, sending the case back for a new award to be calculated.
In a decision Tuesday (Feb . 20), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated the huge award against Cox over illegal downloading by its subscribers — one of the largest ever in an intellectual property lawsuit — on the grounds that part of the verdict was not supported by the law.
The ruling sets the stage for a new trial, but Cox could still be on the hook for heavy damages. That’s because, while the appeals court overturned the jury’s decision that Cox committed so-called vicarious copyright infringement, it affirmed that the internet service provider (ISP) had still committed a different type of infringement.
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Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group all sued Cox in 2018, seeking to hold the internet giant itself liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by its users. The labels said Cox had ignored hundreds of thousands of infringement notices and had never permanently terminated a single subscriber accused of stealing music.
The case was part of a string of such lawsuits filed against ISPs around the country. Charter Communications, RCN Corp., Grande Communications and others were hit with the same claims around the same time.
ISPs like Cox are often shielded from lawsuits over illegal downloading by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. But the judge overseeing the case said that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate people who repeatedly violated copyright law.
Stripped of that immunity, jurors held Cox liable in December 2019 for the infringement of 10,017 separate songs. They awarded the labels more than $99,000 for each song, adding up to $1 billion. Cox eventually appealed that verdict to the Fourth Circuit, a federal appeals court that could overturn it.
In Tuesday’s ruling, the appeals court said that the jury had been correct to find that Cox had willfully committed so-called contributory copyright infringement — meaning the company had induced or authorized its customers to pirate the music. But the court said that the labels had failed to show that Cox committed vicarious infringement, which would have required proving that the ISP profited from the illegal downloading.
“The continued payment of monthly fees for internet service, even by repeat infringers, was not a financial benefit flowing directly from the copyright infringement itself,” the appeals court wrote. “Sony has not identified any evidence that customers were attracted to Cox’s internet service or paid higher monthly fees because of the opportunity to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights.”
Because part of the verdict was tossed out, the court ruled that a new trial would be needed to recalculate the damages award — this time, based only on the finding of contributory infringement.
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Ice Spice will now have to defend her name in a court of law. One of her peers says she lifted a large part from his song for “In Ha Mood”.
Digital Music News is reporting that the Bronx, New York native is being sued by a Brooklyn MC for allegedly shark biting. On Wednesday, Jan. 17 D. Chamberz (born Duval Chamberlain) filed a lawsuit at Brooklyn Federal Court against Ice Spice. He claims that her 2023 hit “In Ha Mood” took elements from his 2021 single “In That Mood”. The submitted paperwork details his complaint saying “by every method of analysis, ‘In Ha Mood’ is a forgery. Any proper comparative analysis of the beat, lyrics, hook, rhythmic structure, metrical placement, and narrative context will demonstrate that ‘In Ha Mood’ was copied or principally derived from ‘In That Mood.’”
His legal team would also allege that the resemblances have been noticed by Hip-Hop fans prior to the filing. “Non-expert listeners have independently pointed out that Defendants ‘stole’ ‘In That Mood’ in creating ‘In Ha Mood,’” his lawyer wrote. “The two songs clearly employ numerous noticeably similar composition elements and lyrics, which result in a sound and feel that are very much alike.”
They also speculate that Ice Spice’s producer RIOTUSA was familiar with “In That Mood” saying that he posted an Instagram Story of him listening to New York radio station HOT97 minutes prior to the song being played. Additionally the lawsuit points to RIOTUSA’s father DJ ENUFF, a radio personality on HOT97, that “actively engaged with D. Chamberz’s social media content.”
Ice Spice has yet to publicly comment on the matter. You can listen to “In That Mood” below.
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The widow of late hip-hop legend MF DOOM, Jasmine Dumile Thompson, filed a lawsuit, claiming that his manager, Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, stole 31 of the rapper’s notebooks that were used to write down many of his beloved songs. This included the tracks from Operation Doomsday (1999), Madvillainy (2004), and MM…FOOD (2004) as well as unreleased songs ideas, musings and “other creative ideations.”
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The case, filed in California federal court Tuesday, is not the first time DOOM’s fans have heard about these notebooks. Back in March, Thompson posted emails between her late husband and Alapatt to the @MFDOOM instagram account with the caption “Egon, Give the Notebooks Back,” sending fans to rally around the rapper’s estate and its struggle to repossess his writing material. Alapatt, who first started working with DOOM as general manager and a&r of Stones Throw Records, has admitted to having the notebooks in the past, according to the complaint, but the estate says he refuses to return them.
Instead, Alapatt is allegedly demanding that the notebooks be “donated to a university or government archive” or a “museum or other institution of [Alapatt’s] choosing,” even though doing so is contrary to his estate’s wishes. “[The notebooks] were intended by DOOM to be secret and confidential,” the lawsuit reads.
It all started in 2010, when the metal-masked rapper travelled to the U.K. to perform but was prohibited from returning to the U.S. due to immigration issues. (He remained in the U.K. until his death on October 31, 2020 at the age of 49). During his absence, the 31 notebooks of lyrical material were left behind in his Los Angeles studio, according to the lawsuit, and Alapatt “took unlawful possession” of the books about six years later.
“Alapatt never consulted with DOOM about his acquisition of the notebooks and took advantage of DOOM’s being out the country to obtain them,” the lawsuit says, but when first confronted by DOOM about the whereabouts of his books, Alapatt allegedly lied at first, saying he didn’t have them. After the landlord of DOOM’s studio allegedly told DOOM that Alapatt did, in fact, have the notebooks, DOOM confronted the manager again.
Alapatt allegedly then told DOOM he got the notebooks because DOOM owed $12,500 in past-due rent, and if someone did not pay it off, the landlord was going to destroy the possessions he left behind. Because Alapatt claims to have paid that rent on DOOM’s behalf, he said that the physical notebooks themselves were legally his property, according the complaint. (Earlier this year, Thompson has come to suspect that DOOM owed no additional rent, and Alapatt simply paid $12,500 to the landlord to buy the books.)
In Summer 2020, Alapatt apparently offered to send DOOM and his family photocopies of the contents of the notebooks for the “sole purpose” of allowing DOOM access but would not give back the physical books themselves. DOOM refused this proposal. In October 2020, shortly before the rapper’s death, the estate says Alapatt sent DOOM a hard drive with large format scans of every notebook he lost, all of which were time stamped between 2018 and March 2020. The lawsuit claims that this proves Alapatt was infringing on his estate’s intellectual property, which is now held by his business entity, Gas Drawls, by creating and disseminating unlawful copies of DOOM’s lyrics.
It is unclear who Alapatt sent these scans to, if anyone, but the lawsuit claims Alapatt was talking to potential buyers, including hip-hop archivists, to sell the notebooks or its copies.
“Although Alapatt has professed that he ‘does not intend to publish’ the unauthorized digital copies he made, he does not have to ‘publish’ the copies of his infringing copies to be liable,” argues the complaint. “Regardless, [DOOM’s estate] alleges that Alapatt actually shared the copies of the notebook he made with others.”
Now, after DOOM’s death, Thompson is intent on getting the notebooks returned to the family, the photo copies destroyed, and “significant compensation” for the damage Alapatt has caused. Along with copyright infringement, the lawsuit alleges “fraud, conversion, unjust enrichment, constructive trust and declaratory relief” and requests a jury trial.
Thompson and Gas Drawls are represented by Miles M. Cooley of Freedman and Taitelman. Alapatt is represented by Kenneth Freundlich of Freundlich Law. Both parties did not immediately return requests for comment on the complaint.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing The Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of copying their 2020 single “Living in a Ghost Town” from a pair of little-known songs, ruling that the case was clearly filed in the wrong court.
Filed in March by songwriter Sergio Garcia Fernandez (stage name Angelslang), the copyright infringement lawsuit claimed that Jagger and Richards “misappropriated many of the recognizable and key protected elements” from his 2006 song “So Sorry” as well as his 2007 tune “Seed of God.”
But in a decision Wednesday (Oct. 18), Judge Eldon E. Fallon ruled that his Louisiana federal court lacked jurisdiction over Fernandez’s case. In doing so, he pointed out that Jagger and Richards are Brits, Fernandez lives in Spain, and The Rolling Stones have “only performed in New Orleans four times.”
“The mere fact that people in this district listen to the Rolling Stones or the alleged work does not permit this court to wield specific jurisdiction over the defendants,” Judge Fallon wrote in dismissing the case.
The judge only tossed the case “without prejudice” — meaning Fernandez is free to re-file the lawsuit in a more appropriate location. In the lead-up to Wednesday’s ruling, lawyers for The Rolling Stones argued that the case should have been filed somewhere in Europe.
In a statement to Billboard, Fernandez’s lawyer said he’s “disappointed and stunned by the court’s ruling.” But he vowed to “refile the lawsuit in a different venue in addition to reviewing other legal options.”
Released at the peak of the COVID-19 shutdowns in April 2020, “Living in a Ghost Town” was the first original material released by the Stones since 2012. The song, a blues-rock tune with reggae influences accompanied by a COVID-themed video, reached No. 3 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in May 2020.
In his lawsuit, Fernandez alleged that the new track was created by borrowing key features from his two earlier songs, including vocal melodies, chord progressions and other elements. “Defendants never paid plaintiff, nor secured the authorization for the use of ‘So Sorry’ and ‘Seed of God,’” his lawyers wrote at the time.
How would members of the iconic band have heard those songs, which have less than 1,000 spins on Spotify? Fernandez claims he gave a demo CD to “an immediate family member” of Jagger.
“The immediate family member … confirmed receipt … to the plaintiff via e-mail, and expressed that the musical works of the plaintiff and its style was a sound The Rolling Stones would be interested in using,” Fernandez’s lawyers wrote.
When the case was first filed, experts told Billboard that it was unlikely to succeed. Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and a professor at Berklee College of Music, said the songs shared only an overall vibe — based on mid-tempo rock grooves in the key of A minor — that’s been ubiquitous in rock and blues since the beginning.
“The Stones didn’t copy from Fernandez, because they didn’t need to,” Bennett said. “They’ve been playing grooves like this for a very long time, as have many others.”
The RIAA has asked to have AI voice cloning added to the government’s piracy watch list, officially known as the Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
The RIAA typically writes in each year, requesting forms of piracy like torrenting, stream ripping, cyber lockers and free music downloading to be included in the final list. All of these categories of piracy are still present in the RIAA’s letter to the U.S. Trade Representative this year, but this is the first time the trade organization, which represents the interest of record labels, has added a form of generative AI to their recommendations.
The RIAA noted that it believes AI voice cloning, also referred to as ‘AI voice synthesis’ or ‘AI voice filters,’ infringes on their members’ copyrights and the artists’ rights to their voices and calls out one U.S.-based AI voice cloning site, Voicify.AI as one that should specifically face scrutiny.
According to the letter, Voicify.AI’s service includes voice models that emulate sound recording artists like Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Eminem, Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and others, as well as political figures including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barak Obama.
The RIAA claims that this type of service infringes on copyrights because it “stream-rips the YouTube video selected by the user, copies the acapella from the track, modifies the acapella using the AI vocal model, and then provides the user unauthorized copies of the modified acapella stem, the underlying instrumental bed, and the modified remixed recording.” Essentially, some of these AI voice cloning sites train its models on stolen copyrights.
It additionally claims that there is a violation pf the artists’ right of publicity, the right that protects public figures from having their name, likeness, and voice commercially exploited without their permission. This is a more tenuous right, given it is only a state-level protection and its strength varies by state. It also becomes more limited after a public figure’s death. However, this is possibly the most common legal argument against AI voice cloning technology in the music business.
This form of artificial intelligence first became widely recognized last spring, when an anonymous TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI to mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd in his song “Heart On My Sleeve” with shocking precision. The song was briefly available on streaming services, like YouTube, but was taken down after a stern letter from the artists’ label, Universal Music Group. However, the song was ultimately removed from official services due to a copyright infringement in the track, not because of a right of publicity claim.
A few months later, Billboard reported that streamers were in talks with the three major label groups about allowing them to file take down requests for right of publicity violations — something which previously was only allowed in cases of copyright infringement as dictated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlike the DMCA, the newly discussed arrangement regarding right of publicity issues would be a voluntary one. In July, UMG’s general counsel and executive vp of business and legal affairs, Jeffery Harleston, spoke as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and copyright and asked for a new “federal right of publicity” to be made into law to protect artists’ voices.
An additional challenge in regulating this area is that many AI models available on the internet for global users are not based in the U.S., meaning the U.S. government has little recourse to stop their alleged piracy, even if alerted by trade organizations like the RIAA. Certain countries are known to be more relaxed on AI regulation — like China, Israel, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore — which has created safe havens for AI companies to grow abroad.
The U.S. Trade Representative still must review this letter from the RIAA as well as other recommendations from other industry groups and determine whether or not they believe AI voice cloning should be included on the watchlist. The office will likely issue their final review at the start of next year.
As listeners continue to dissect Drake’s new album For All the Dogs, English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys are calling out the MC for interpolating their 1986 song “West End Girls” on “All the Parties” without proper credit or permission. The lyrics in question come when Drake sings, “And it’s 6, our town a dead end world/ […]
The yearslong legal battle over Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud” has officially drawn to a close. The heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer on Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On”, who sued Sheeran in 2016 for allegedly infringing the classic song in his smash 2014 single, have officially dropped their appeal in the long-running case, according […]
