Copyright
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A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Monday (Oct. 30) that artificial intelligence (AI) firm Stability AI could not dismiss a lawsuit claiming it had “trained” its platform on copyrighted images, though he also sided with AI companies on key questions.
In an early-stage order in a closely watched case, Judge William Orrick found many defects in the lawsuit’s allegations, and he dismissed some of the case’s claims. But he allowed the case to move forward on its core allegation: That Stability AI built its tools by exploiting vast numbers of copyrighted works.
“Plaintiffs have adequately alleged direct infringement based on the allegations that Stability downloaded or otherwise acquired copies of billions of copyrighted images without permission to create Stable Diffusion, and used those images to train Stable Diffusion,” the judge wrote.
The ruling came in one of many cases filed against AI companies over how they use copyrighted content to train their models. Authors, comedians and visual artists have all filed lawsuits against companies including Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI, alleging that such unauthorized use by the fast-growing industry amounts to a massive violation of copyright law.
Last week, Universal Music Group and others filed the first such case involving music, arguing that Anthropic PBC was infringing copyrights en masse by using “vast amounts” of music to teach its software how to spit out new lyrics.
Rulings in the earlier AI copyright cases could provide important guidance on how such legal questions will be handled by courts, potentially impacting how UMG’s lawsuit and others like it play out in the future.
Monday’s decision came in a class action filed by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz against Stability AI Ltd. over its Stable Diffusion — an AI-powered image generator. The lawsuit also targeted Midjourney Inc. and DeviantArt Inc., two companies that use Stable Diffusion as the basis for their own image generators.
In his ruling, Judge Orrick dismissed many of the lawsuit’s claims. He booted McKernan and Ortiz from the case entirely and ordered the plaintiffs to re-file an amended version of their case with much more detail about the specific allegations against Midjourney and DeviantArt.
The judge also cast doubt on the allegation that every “output” image produced by Stable Diffusion would itself be a copyright-infringing “derivative” of the images that were used to train the model — a ruling that could dramatically limit the scope of the lawsuit. The judge suggested that such images might only be infringing if they themselves looked “substantially similar” to a particular training image.
But Judge Orrick included no such critiques for the central accusation that Stability AI infringed Andersen’s copyrights by using them for training without permission — the basic allegation at the center of all of the AI copyright lawsuits, including the one filed by UMG. Andersen will still need to prove that such an accusation is true in future litigation, but the judge said she should be given the chance to do so.
“Even Stability recognizes that determination of the truth of these allegations — whether copying in violation of the Copyright Act occurred in the context of training Stable Diffusion or occurs when Stable Diffusion is run — cannot be resolved at this juncture,” Orrick wrote in his decision.
Attorneys for Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt did not return requests for comment. Attorneys for the artists praised the judge for allowing their “core claim” to move forward and onto “a path to trial.”
“As is common in a complex case, Judge Orrick granted the plaintiffs permission to amend most of their other claims,” said plaintiffs’ attorneys Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick after the ruling. “We’re confident that we can address the court’s concerns.”
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.
After successfully defeating a lawsuit that claimed they ripped off their 2019 hit “Dancing With a Stranger” from an earlier song, Sam Smith and Normani are now demanding that their accuser reimburse their legal bills – a whopping total of $732,202.
In a ruling last month, a federal judge rejected allegations that Smith and Normani had copied a little-known 2015 song of the same name when they released “Dancing,” one of Smith’s top-charting hits that peaked at No. 7 on the Hot 100 chart.
Now, Smith and Normani say they shouldn’t be forced to foot the bill for a “frivolous and unreasonable” lawsuit.
“Defective copyright infringement claims, like Plaintiff’s claims here, burden the court, cause potentially damaging negative publicity for recording artists … and others, and force needless attorney’s fees on them,” wrote attorney Peter Anderson, who reps the two stars in a Sept 22 court filing. “Awarding attorney’s fees here will deter plaintiff and others from filing and blindly prosecuting such claims without anything close to the required factual and legal basis.”
The case against Smith and Normani was filed last year by songwriters Jordan Vincent, Christopher Miranda and Rosco Banlaoi, who claimed that “Dancing” was “strikingly similar” to their 2015 same-named track. In their complaint, they said it was “beyond any real doubt” that the song had been copied.
But last month, U.S. District Judge Wesley L. Hsu said it was, in fact, very much in doubt. Granting Smith and Normani’s motion for an immediate ruling ending the lawsuit, the judge said the songs simply were not similar – and he criticized the plaintiffs for manipulating them to make them appear more alike.
“Permitting copyright plaintiffs to prevail … by rotating chords, recalibrating the tempo, and altering the pitch of a defendant’s song so that it sounds more similar to the plaintiffs’ would lead courts to deem substantially similar two vastly dissimilar musical compositions,” Judge Hsu wrote at the time.
Unlike most forms of litigation, winners in copyright lawsuits are often able to legally recover the money they spent on lawyers fighting the case. Judges grant such requests in cases where a lawsuit shouldn’t have been filed, and they can serve as a powerful deterrent against future questionable lawsuits.
In their filing asking Hsu to order Vincent, Miranda and Banlaoi to reimburse them, Smith and Normani said the songwriters’ case had been exactly the kind of pointless lawsuit that needs to be deterred.
“Plaintiff sought to monopolize unprotectable elements that are common property to all,” Anderson wrote. “Claims like Plaintiff’s here threaten to cheat the public domain and curtail the creation of new works.”
As for the total, the pair of stars said they had incurred a whopping $732,202 bill for the services of Anderson and other lawyers from the top firm Davis Wright Tremaine who defended them. That figure was “below the median hourly rates” of similar elite copyright lawyers, they said, and they were “perfectly justified” in racking up big bills on a case that was demanding all of the profits from a a multi-platinum hit song.
BMG has reached a settlement to end a copyright lawsuit against a toymaker that promoted a brand of “unicorn poop” with a song called “My Poops” – a scatological parody set to the tune of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps.”
In an order Tuesday, a federal judge said that BMG and toymaker MGA Entertainment had “reached a settlement in principle” to resolve the lawsuit, marking an abrupt end to what would have been a high-profile dispute over copyright’s fair use doctrine when it comes to parody songs.
Neither side immediately returned requests for comment or more information about the terms of the settlement, like whether any money was exchanged.
Released to promote MGA’s Poopsie Slime Surprise toys – unicorns that release sparkling “unicorn poop” slime – “My Poops” features similar musical elements to Black Eyed Peas’ 2005 hit, which reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and spent 36 total weeks on the chart. But it replaces the words with joke lyrics like “Whatcha gonna do with all that poop, all that poop.”
In a January complaint, BMG said the song was very clearly an infringement of its copyrights. In addition to copying key musical elements, BMG said, MGA’s song features a lead vocalist who “sounds very similar” to Black Eyed Peas lead singer Fergie.
“Music, especially a hit song such as ‘My Humps,’ adds great value when incorporated into a product or used in a video advertisement, because it increases consumer recognizability, consumer engagement and attention to the product,” BMG wrote in its lawsuit. “The infringing work is so substantially similar to ‘My Humps’ that it is obvious that the infringing work was intentionally copied.”
Federal protections for fair use expressly empower people to parody existing copyrighted works, and one of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important copyright rulings held that 2 Live Crew was allowed to release a bawdy parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” without paying royalties. But the music industry’s premiere parodist, “Weird Al” Yankovic, voluntarily chooses to license all of the songs that he parodies. And the legal analysis is undoubtedly trickier when a parody song is used for outright commercial advertising, rather than merely as a new song.
Back in 2013, the Beastie Boys sued a toy company called GoldieBlox after it released a viral parody of the group’s 1987 song “Girls” to promote its engineering and construction toys for girls. After the band threatened copyright infringement, GoldieBlox argued fair use – saying it had aimed to criticize the “highly sexist” message of the original Beastie Boys track and “further the company’s goal to break down gender stereotypes.”
But six months later, GoldieBlox agreed to a settlement in which it apologized to the Beastie Boys and agreed to donate a portion of its revenues to charities of the band’s choosing.
Back in 2018, when music producer Sherman Nealy filed a lawsuit against Warner Music Group, it was just a run-of-the-mill copyright case. Nealy claimed that Flo Rida’s 2008 tune “In the Ayer” featured an unlicensed sample of “Jam the Box,” a 1984 track released by Pretty Tony that he owns.
It’s the same kind of claim that’s made in federal courts every day.
But five years later, Nealy’s lawsuit is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will use it as a vehicle to answer big unresolved questions about how much money can be awarded in copyright cases. Are those damages limited to just the last three years before a case was filed? Or can they range back decades, adding potentially many more millions to the total?
The high court’s eventual ruling, which the justices will issue next spring, will apply to all forms of copyrighted works, but the music industry is paying particularly close attention. In a filing earlier this year, record labels and music publishers called the case “exceptionally important” to their business.
Pay After Delay?
The controversy at the center of the case against Warner dates back to 2014, when the Supreme Court ruled that the movie studio MGM could be sued for copyright infringement over Raging Bull, even though the case was filed decades after the Martin Scorsese-directed film had first been released in 1980. The studio argued that long delay was unfair, but the justices pointed out that the Copyright Act has a three-year statute of limitations that resets with every new infringement.
Under the court’s interpretation of the law, as long as copies of an allegedly infringing book, song or movie had been sold during the three years prior to the lawsuit, it was fair game for a copyright case. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that ruling led to a surge in long-delayed infringement cases, including a high-profile lawsuit against Led Zeppelin over the 1971 song “Stairway To Heaven.”
But like many Supreme Court decisions, the Raging Bull ruling ultimately raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them: if you can sue many years later, how far back can you seek damages? If you successfully sue someone in 2023 over a song that came out in 1995, can you demand payment based on 27 years of illegal sales?
In the Raging Bull ruling, the Supreme Court seemed to say no. In her opinion, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was fairly clear: “A successful plaintiff can gain retrospective relief only three years back from the time of suit. No recovery may be had for infringement in earlier years. Profits made in those years remain the defendant’s to keep.”
In the years since, the New York-centric U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has taken that language literally, ruling a copyright accuser cannot win damages for any for any conduct older than three years – full stop. If you wait to sue over a hit song from the 1990s, you cannot tap into those huge profits when you win the lawsuit.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (covering California) disagrees. If you can prove that you only recently “discovered” the fact that your copyright was infringed, the Ninth Circuit says you can seek damages going back all the way to all the way back to the very first infringement – potentially decades worth of penalties.
That means the two courts that contain the vast majority of the country’s creative industries are directly divided over how copyright law works – a so-called “circuit split” that the Supreme Court is tasked with correcting.
Heading To Court
Nealy sued Atlantic Records, Warner Chappell and Artist Publishing Group in Florida federal court in 2018, arguing he had never actually granted them a valid license for his “Jam the Box” to be sampled in Flo Rida’s “In the Ayer,” which reached No. 9 on the Hot 100 after being released in July 2008.
In 2021, the judge overseeing the case cited Raging Bull and ruled that Nealy couldn’t win any money from earlier than 2015. Though Nealy said he had only learned of the illegal sample in 2016 and wanted damages going all the way back to 2008, the judge cited the Supreme Court’s “binding precedent” that had “explicitly delimited damages to the three years prior.”
But earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit overturned that ruling. Siding with the Ninth Circuit’s approach, the appeals court ruled that Nealy’s late discovery of the infringement was a different situation than the one dealt with in Raging Bull – and that any similar “discovery rule” cases would be allowed to seek damages as far back as they went.
Warner quickly appealed that decision to the Supreme Court. Repped by elite SCOTUS attorney Kannon Shanmugam of the law firm Paul Weiss, the company argued in a May petition that the “discovery” approach would unfairly expand the “financial exposure” of a copyright defendant and potentially lead to frivolous lawsuits that aimed to “extract settlements.”
“Deprived of a predictable limitations period and faced with expensive, time-consuming, and difficult litigation in order to defend years-old uses of copyrighted works, defendants will often be left with no choice but to settle claims early even in the absence of wrongdoing—or potentially never enter valuable agreements in the first place,” Shanmugam wrote for his client.
“Vitally Important”
The phrases “retroactive relief” and “three-year lookback period” might make your eyes glaze over, but the Nealy v. Warner case has big implications for copyright-heavy industries like music.
After the Raging Bull ruling dropped in 2014, artists and labels saw a rash of long-delayed cases. The lawsuit against Led Zeppelin – which resulted in more than six years of costly litigation before the band was ultimately cleared of all wrongdoing – was the most prominent, but it was just one of many. Meatloaf was sued over his 1993 song “I’d Do Anything For Love”; U2 was accused of ripping off its 1991 hit “The Fly”; and another case claimed that Notorious B.I.G.’s 1993 hit “Party and Bullshit” featured an unlicensed sample.
If the Supreme Court eventually rules in favor of Nealy, it would almost certainly encourage more age-old cases, creating a far larger potential prize for a successful accuser. As Nealy’s attorneys argued at an earlier stage of his case, when it comes to years-old copyright claims, “the vast bulk of damages” will typically fall outside the three-year limit.
Labels and publishers are watching the case closely. In a June brief at the Supreme Court, the Recording Industry Association of America and National Music Publishers’ Association didn’t advocate for either camp, but simply urged the justices to take up a case that is “vitally important to the music industry.”
“Because copyrights are the music industry’s most consequential asset, music labels and music publishers regularly find themselves both enforcing and defending copy right lawsuits,” lawyers for RIAA and NMPA wrote. “Without a clear national rule setting the temporal limits of recoverable damages, amici and their members face serious uncertainty.”
Sam Smith and Normani have prevailed in a copyright lawsuit against their 2019 hit “Dancing With a Stranger” a California judge agreed to dismiss the case Wednesday (Sept. 6). Released in 2019 off Smith’s third studio album Love Goes, “Dancing with a Stranger” is one of their top-charting hits, peaking at No. 7 on the […]
The U.S. Copyright Office issued a ruling on Tuesday (Sept. 5), confirming that songwriters and publishers are owed late fees when streaming services do not pay royalties to the Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) on time. This, however, does not apply to the major adjustments in royalty payments currently underway following the re-setting of Phonorecords III rates (2018-2022), according to the office.
Late fees have been an ongoing debate between the music publishing industry and streaming services dating back to the passage of the Music Modernization Act (the MMA) in 2018. That landmark law switched how streaming services licensed music, from a song-by-song piecemeal system — which many considered ineffective and cumbersome — to a blanket licensing regime instead.
The law took effect starting Jan. 1, 2021, requiring digital music providers like Spotify and Apple Music to go to the newly created MLC to obtain a blanket mechanical license to reproduce music on these platforms. As part of the new system, streamers had to pay out royalties owed to the MLC, which then pays the writers and publishers, each month. More specifically, the law stipulates mechanicals are due “45 calendar days after the end of the monthly reporting period.”
After that, any lagging payment is considered late and subject to additional penalties, according to the MMA. For the current period of Phonorecords IV (2023-2027), the Copyright Royalty Board judges say that a streaming service must pay a late fee of 1.5% per month, or the highest lawful rate, whichever of those two is lower, for any payment owed to the music’s copyright owners that hadn’t been paid on time. The late fees accrue from the due date until the copyright owner receives payment.
The main source of debate around late fees is whether they should apply in the case of a monthly payment that needs adjustment after it is paid out. Streaming services have argued that “‘[i]f a service is following the regulations by making a reasonable estimate of an input it does not know the value of, it should not be penalized with a late fee even if it so happens that the estimate is too low.”
On the other side, the MLC has argued that allowing such exceptions would incentivize the streaming services to intentionally draw up payment estimates that undervalue what is owed to songwriters and publishers.
The Tuesday ruling by the Copyright Office settles the debate: “The Office concludes that the statute’s due date provisions are unambiguous. The statute’s reference to ‘due date for payment’ clearly refers to the date on which monthly royalty payments are required to be delivered to the MLC, i.e., no later than forty-five days after the end of the monthly reporting period.”
“This is a major victory for music creators who have waited far too long to be made whole from the appeal which significantly delayed their compensation,” says NMPA President and CEO David Israelite. “The USCO’s decision reiterates our assertion that the due dates are unambiguous and any past-due payments to the MLC must come with appropriate statutory penalties.”
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have won a court ruling tossing out a lawsuit that accused them of stealing the lyrics to their smash hits “WAP” and “Thot Shit” from an earlier track called “Grab Em by the P—-.”
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In a decision issued Tuesday (Aug. 29), a Manhattan federal judge ruled that the lyrics Cardi and Megan were accused of copying in their songs — “p—- so wet” and “n—-s wild’n” — were simply too unoriginal to be covered by copyright law.
“The lyrics over which plaintiff asserts copyright protection are no more than common phrases, employed frequently in popular culture and other Hip-Hop songs,” U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter wrote.
“The concept of using ‘p—- so wet’ as a rhetorical device in a song is neither original nor unique to plaintiff,” the judge wrote. “Likewise, defendants have provided examples of at least three songs pre-dating [‘Grab Em’] which use some variation of the phrase ‘n—–s wild’n.’”
The ruling dismissed a lawsuit filed last year by Denise Jones, a rapper who performs under the name Necey X, against Cardi (Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar), Megan (Megan Pete) and Atlantic Records. Jones, who sued without the aid of a lawyer, claimed that the stars chose to “copy and paste” her lyrics into their songs.
But in Tuesday’s decision, Judge Carter said Jones not only lacked valid copyrights in those lyrics but that Cardi and Megan’s own words were not “substantially similar” to those in “Grab Em” — the key requirement for proving copyright infringement.
“Defendants’ lyric, ‘why you in the club with n—-s wild’n,’ poses a question to the rapper (or to the audience), while plaintiff’s lyric refers to the rapper’s effect on a single individual,” the judge wrote. “Thus, the phrase is used in different ways and has different meanings such that an ordinary listener would not identify defendants’ lyric as being appropriated from plaintiff’s song.”
The lawsuit also included additional claims beyond copyright law, including that Cardi and Megan had stalked and harassed Jones. But Judge Carter quickly dispatched those allegations as well.
“Plaintiff makes generalized allegations about fearing for her safety from alleged stalking and harassment by the ‘cartel’ that she equates to the music industry at large, but plaintiff neither identifies any negligent conduct on the part of defendants or any special duty to avoid causing emotional distress,” the judge wrote.
Jones did not return a request for comment on the ruling Friday.
Released in August 2020 by Cardi with guest vocals by Megan, “WAP” was a smash hit, spending four weeks atop the Hot 100. “Thot Shit,” released a year later by Megan, was partly inspired by the backlash that “WAP” had received from conservative critics; it reached No. 16 on the Hot 100.
Whether by coincidence, osmosis, common ancestry or, you know, theft, there are plenty of hit songs that sound strangely similar to pre-existing material… or do they? Enter the lawsuit. While some artists and songwriters shrug off similarities, others take it to court, demanding what they perceive is their due when it comes to alleged copyright infringement.
Of course, music history – especially when it comes to pre-recorded music – is rife with songs that were inspired by (or wholesale stolen from) previous material. Early rock n’ roll songs frequently lifted riffs, lyrics and chords from classic blues and country songs, which themselves were often based on folk tunes, African-American spirituals and work songs, nursery rhymes and even melodies from classical compositions. If you could time travel and track the authorship of songs as simple as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “Yankee Doodle,” the list of co-writers for each would probably run north of two dozen by modern standards of crediting songwriters for their contributions.
As recorded music became big business over the 20th century (and new technology made it easier to track song authorship and a writer’s exposure to previous material), copyright lawsuits became a regular occurrence in the music industry. But the litigation really took off in the 2010s, after a landmark lawsuit between the estate of Marvin Gaye and Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over “Blurred Lines” made things a bit more muddled (or blurred, if you will).
In the aftermath of the “Blurred Lines” case, many songwriters opted to credit scribes whose copyrighted material bore even a passing resemblance to theirs, assuming it was easier to give credit than deal with a protracted, expensive lawsuit. But more recently, many artists have started to fight back, fearing that settling with accusers was leading to more unjustified lawsuits. Led Zeppelin, Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran have all won high-profile victories in recent years, defeating copyright cases by arguing that basic musical building blocks must be free for everyone to use.
It’s worth mentioning that technically, plagiarism (taking someone else’s efforts and presenting it as your own original work) is not illegal in the United States. If a dispute over a song reaches the courts, it’s over copyright infringement, not plagiarism, so the arguments over these songs are about whether someone ran afoul of copyright law. (Although most people tsk-tsk plagiarists, too.)
The songs on this list share two things in common: They topped the Billboard Hot 100, and some people believe they lifted elements from a previously existing song. Inclusion on this list doesn’t imply wrongdoing. Several of these disagreements settled out of court; one was settled without any lawsuit being filed; and one artist handily won their case against the accuser.
Read on to see how the rest of the songs fared.
“Come Together”
Karol G and Tiësto are facing a copyright infringement lawsuit over their song “Don’t Be Shy,” filed by a Cuban-American songwriter who says their track features elements that are “practically identical” to his earlier tune.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in Puerto Rico federal court, lawyers for songwriter Rene Lorente claim that Karol G and Tiësto’s 2021 dance-pop hit infringed his 2000 song “Algo Diferente” by using a melody that “sounds identical.”
“It doesn’t take an expert or musician, to carefully listen to the melody/sounds of each, to recognize that one was copied from the other,” Lorente’s lawyers wrote in their complaint. “In this case, defendants’ ‘Don’t be Shy’ is a blatant violation of plaintiff’s copyrighted ‘Algo Diferente’.”
Karol G, who is currently sitting atop Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart with her “Qlona,” teamed up with Tiësto to release “Don’t Be Shy” in August 2021. The song, which hit No. 4 on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, was the Columbian star’s first released in English.
But in his lawsuit, Lorente claims Karol G and Tiësto’s song “misappropriated his beloved copyrighted work” – a tune released in May 2000 that currently has 3,647 total streams on Spotify. A version of “Algo Diferente” on YouTube, uploaded just nine days ago by CD Baby, has been streamed 6,423 times.
According to Lorente’s lawyers, a comparison of the two songs shows that they are “substantially similar” – the requirement to prove copyright infringement.
“Expert analysis of musical arrangement fragment of the copyrighted and infringing works, show exact rhythm, note arrangement, same intervals, harmony, with the only change being limited perhaps to the pitch, within 8 musical bars, repeated throughout infringing work,” Lorente’s lawyers wrote in his lawsuit. “However, for a lay listener and a jury, this combination of musical notes sounds identical.”
The lawsuit is seeking a whopping $52 million dollars, but attorneys who file lawsuits can claim any damages total they want. Even if Lorente’s lawsuit was successful – and that is not a given – such demands are typically not good indicators for what a judge or jury might ultimately award.
Reps for Karol G and Tiësto did not return requests for comment on Thursday.
Listen to the two songs below and compare for yourself:
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