Legal News
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Linkin Park is facing a lawsuit that claims it has refused to credit or pay royalties to an ex-bassist who played with the band in the late 1990s — a legal battle triggered by an anniversary re-release of the band’s smash hit 2000 debut album.
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In a complaint filed Wednesday (Nov. 8) federal court, Kyle Christner says he helped creating many songs that were included on the 2020 box-set edition of Hybrid Theory, which holds the lofty distinction as the best-selling rock album of the 21st century. But he says his contributions have been effectively erased.
“Christner has never been paid a penny for his work with Linkin Park, nor has he been properly credited, even as defendants have benefitted from his creative efforts,” his lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.
Christner claims he was a member of Linkin Park for several months in 1999, until he was “abruptly informed” that he had been fired shortly before the band signed a record deal with Warner Records. But before his exit, Christner claims he played bass on a self-released EP and on several demo recordings, some of which he says he “helped compose.”
His lawsuit claims that as many as 20 of those recordings were released as goodies on the 2020 re-release, making him “a joint creator of many tracks in the box set.” That includes a song called “Could Have Been,” a never-before-released demo track that has amassed 949,000 views on YouTube.
According to Christner, the situation came to a head earlier this year when he was contacted by a Linkin Park representative offering him royalties for the Hybrid Theory re-release. The email allegedly read: “You get mechanical royalties for 3 demos and the 6-song Hybrid Theory EP that you performed on.”
Christner responded by pressing the band for a more detailed explanation of his royalty breakdown, and arguing that he was entitled to a cut from a greater number of tracks — “more than twenty songs.” He later told the band: “If you do not believe I deserve writing credits on these songs, please state your reasons for that in your response.”
Later, after lawyers got involved, Christner says the band backtracked, denying that his work appeared in the box set at all.
“In other words, after admitting that Christner played on at least some tracks included in the box set and admitting that Christner was entitled to at least some ‘mechanical’ royalties, which are royalties paid for compositions, defendants repudiated Christner’s co-authorship and co-ownership of the works at issue,” his lawyers wrote in Wednesday’s complaint.
In technical terms, the lawsuit is asking a judge to issue a so-called declaratory judgment that says Christner is a co-author and co-owner of the copyrights in question, and to weigh in on the “rights and obligations of the parties” — meaning, whether the band owes him a cut of royalties and how much. He also is asking for a court-ordered accounting of royalties for the disputed songs.
As defendants, the lawsuit personally names Linkin Park’s living members (Mike Shinoda, Rob Bourdon, Brad Delson and Joseph Hahn), as well as its business entity, Machine Shop Entertainment LLC, and the band’s label Warner Records.
A rep for Linkin Park did not immediately return a request for comment.
An Atlanta judge ruled Thursday that he would allow many of Young Thug’s rap lyrics to be used as evidence against him and other alleged gang members in their upcoming criminal trial, rejecting arguments that doing so would violate the First Amendment.
The ruling came a day after Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville held a hotly-anticipated hearing about the use of lyrics as evidence – a controversial practice that has drawn backlash from the music industry and efforts by lawmakers to stop it.
The lyrics could play a key role in the trial, which will kick off later this month. Prosecutors allege that Thug (Jeffery Williams) and his “YSL” were not really a popular music collective called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life” that committed murders, carjackings, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
Representing the superstar artist, attorney Brian Steel blasted prosecutors for attempting to use creative expression to convict his client. “They are targeting the right to free speech, and that’s wrong,” Steel said. “They are saying that just because he his singing about it, he is now part of a crime.”
But after an hours-long hearing that ran until nearly 9 pm on Wednesday evening, Judge Glanville largely rejected those arguments. “They’re not prosecuting your clients because of the songs they wrote,” Glanville said from the bench. “They’re using the songs to prove other things your clients may have been involved in. I don’t think it’s an attack on free speech.”
In a formal ruling on Thursday morning, the judge denied Thug’s request to ban the lyrics entirely, and granted a motion by prosecutors to preliminarily admit them. Though Judge Glanville said prosecutors would still need to establish why they were using them and that Steel could object during the trial, the judge repeatedly suggested at Wednesday’s hearing that he would allow lyrics to be admitted as evidence and that it would be up to jurors to decide how much weight to give them.
At the hearing, prosecutor Michael Carlson urged Judge Glanville to avoid sweeping questions about free speech. He said the actual issue before the court was not rap lyrics but rather “proclamations of violence” by alleged gang members that are “highly relevant in this case.”
“The issue here is not rap,” Carlson said. “This is not randomly the state attempting to bring in Run DMC from the 80s. This is specific. These are party admissions. They just happen come in the form of lyrics.”
Near the end of the hearing, Carlson sharply criticized the suggestion that the rap lyrics in question were simply works of art without a direct link to real events. “People can look at that indictment and see one thing that’s for sure not fantasy: People are dead. Murdered.”
“That’s not fantasy, your honor,” Carlson said. “That’s tragically real.”
Earlier on Wednesday, prosecutor Symone Hylton highlighted specific lyrics that the state plans to play for jurors during the trial and explained why they were relevant enough to be admitted. They included lines from Thug’s 2016 song “Slime Shit,” in which he raps about “killin’ 12 shit” and “hundred rounds in a Tahoe.”
Hylton argued that “12” is a well-known euphemism for police officers, and that the lyric referred to a specific incident in which an officer was shot by a YSL member. And she said that the “Tahoe” lyric was a boast about the 2015 murder of Donovan Thomas – a key allegation in the indictment.
“Not only did Donovan Thomas drive a Tahoe, there were multiple rounds of shell casings laid out on the ground where he was killed in front of his barber shop,” Hylton said. “While [the lyric] may on the surface seem irrelevant, when you put it to the facts that are going to come out in this case, that particular verse becomes very relevant.”
Among other songs, she also referenced the 2018 track “Anybody,” in which Thug raps “I never killed anybody/ But I got somethin’ to do with that body”; and the song “Really Be Slime,” a 2021 compilation track released by Young Stoner Life Records that features the line “You wanna be slime? Go catch you a body.”
“It’s the state’s contention that [the lyric] means you go out and you go murder someone,” Hylton said. “That’s how you become ‘slime’.”
Young Thug, Gunna and dozens of other alleged YSL members were indicted in May 2022. Gunna and several other defendants eventually reached plea deals, and other defendants were separated from the main case, leaving just Thug and five others to face a jury. If fully convicted, he could face a life sentence.
After months of delays, a jury was finally seated last week, clearing the way for the trial to kick off on Nov. 27 – proceedings that are expected to last well into 2024. But before then, Judge Ural Glanville must decide on whether the jury can hear his lyrics as part of the prosecution’s case.
Civil liberties activists and defense attorneys have long criticized the use of rap lyrics to win criminal convictions. They argue that it unfairly targets constitutionally protected speech, treating hyperbolic verse as literal confessions; they also say it can unfairly sway juries by tapping into racial biases.
Lawmakers in California enacted legislation last year restricting the use of creative expression as evidence in criminal cases, and a federal bill in Congress that would impose similar restrictions has been widely supported by the music industry. But absent such statutes, courts around the country have mostly upheld the right of prosecutors to cite rap lyrics, particularly in gang-related cases.
In his arguments Wednesday, Thug’s lawyer Steel echoed such concerns in pushing to exclude the lyrics from the case. He noted that many other artists had used similar phrases – he name-dropped Rick Ross, Meek Mill and Cardi B — and that rap lyrics are often exaggerated or wholly fictional. Steel argued that individual lyrics should only be admitted when prosecutors have linked them much more specifically to actual alleged actions – an analysis he said the DA’s office had failed to perform.
But Steel’s main message for Judge Glanville was that using the lyrics would violate the First Amendment and its protections for free speech, arguing that it would effectively criminalize the output of a “prolific songwriter.”
“A person in America can say I hate Brian Steel, I hate criminal defense lawyers, I hate prosecutors, I hate judges,” Steel said. “We believe that we flourish when we can share ideas even when they’re repugnant, even when you don’t agree with them.”
“If you allow this evidence,” Steel said, “it’s going to have a chilling effect.”
But Judge Glanville was skeptical of Steel’s arguments from the beginning, repeatedly suggesting that he believed some of the lyrics were relevant enough to be admitted in the case — and occasionally showing frustration with Steel’s arguments to the contrary. At one point, he interrupted Steel to say that “the First Amendment is not on trial.”
Later, Steel said that prosecutors were using Thug’s “words” to convince jurors that he was “a bad man” — the kind of improper “character” evidence that is typically rejected. But Judge Glanville again had a quick retort: “No they’re not. They’re using his words to show that he’s involved in a gang.”
Antonio “L.A.” Reid — the legendary music industry executive who headed up labels including Epic, Island Def Jam and Arista over the course of a storied career — has been sued for sexual assault and harassment by former Arista A&R executive Drew Dixon.
In a complaint filed Wednesday (Nov. 8) in U.S. District Court in New York, Dixon publicly claims for the first time that Reid sexually assaulted her on two separate occasions — incidents she claims derailed her once-promising career and ultimately cost her millions of dollars in lost income. Dixon had previously accused Reid of harassment in a 2017 article for The New York Times as well as a subsequent documentary.
The lawsuit was brought under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which allows alleged victims of sexual offenses that fall outside the statute of limitations to file civil suits for a year-long period spanning from Nov. 24, 2022, to Nov. 24, 2023.
Dixon contextualizes Reid’s alleged harassment and assault with the abuse she claims to have suffered at the hands of another former boss: Russell Simmons. In the same 2017 New York Times article where she lodged harassment claims against Reid, Dixon claimed that Simmons raped her during her tenure as an A&R executive at his Def Jam label. She now claims that Reid was “aware” of Simmon’s alleged assault at the time she began working for him at Arista — and that Reid nevertheless went on to abuse her as well.
According to the Nov. 8 complaint, the first alleged assault occurred on a private plane to Puerto Rico in 2001, when Dixon was serving as vp of A&R at Arista during Reid’s tenure as president/CEO. Dixon claims she was told not to book her own flight to Puerto Rico, where Reid was hosting a company-wide retreat, because Reid had invited a group of senior executives to join him on a private jet. But when she arrived, she claims she “was confused…to find Mr. Reid all alone.” Dixon claims that Reid began flirting right away and, after asking her to sit beside him to go over materials for a presentation, he began “kissing her and digitally penetrated her vulva without her consent.”
Dixon goes on to state that though she was entitled to her own room at the hotel in Puerto Rico, she insisted on sharing a room with her assistant “to avoid any possibility that Mr. Reid might try to find another way to be alone with her during the retreat.” She says that throughout their time there, she “stayed close to her assistant” before taking a commercial flight home in order to avoid a similar incident.
The second alleged assault occurred later that same year following a work event in New York, when Reid allegedly insisted that Dixon “join him for a ride to drop her at home so they could continue to discuss work and he could listen to some of the music she had been waiting for him to review,” including a demo of a young singer named Alice Smith. Dixon says she agreed because “it was not a very long ride” and because she knew Reid’s driver would be present — and also “that if she continued to avoid Mr. Reid, she would never be able to get anything approved for her artists.”
Not long into the car ride, Dixon alleges, Reid began “to grope and kiss” her as she “squirmed and pushed him away” while his driver “stared straight ahead.” After Reid allegedly “complained and became visibly irritated with her lack of compliance,” Dixon says she “froze” and claims that Reid once again “digitally penetrated” her vulva without her consent.
Following the second alleged assault, Dixon says she “intensified her efforts to avoid” Reid, knowing that reporting the alleged assaults would be “career ending.” Though she says she was advised by other Arista executives, at Reid’s behest, “to wear skirts and high heels” at work, she claims she began wearing “jeans and Birkenstock clogs” to the office under the belief that it would make her less of a target for Reid.
However, Dixon claims that Reid continued to sexually harass her, including by inviting her to meetings in his hotel room at the Four Seasons “night after night.” Though she says she continually turned down these overtures, she claims Reid began calling her late at night and that, when she began letting his calls go straight to voicemail, he “became angrier and angrier” and “turned hostile towards her, and her artists, and her ideas.”
Dixon claims Reid then channeled his anger into thwarting her career and the careers of her artists.
“Promotional and recording budgets were suddenly reduced dramatically or frozen altogether,” the complaint reads. “Song demos and artist auditions were flatly rejected. Ms. Dixon could not do her job at Arista, and she became increasingly concerned that her stifled success at Arista would impede her ability to secure a similar job at another label.”
Dixon additionally accuses Reid of “blocking” artists she attempted to sign — including, she claims, future megastars Kanye West and John Legend. After allegedly bringing in West for an audition, she claims Reid passed on the rapper “and then proceeded to berate Ms. Dixon in front of the whole A&R department about how bad she was at her job and what a waste of his time the audition had been, all while Kanye waited in the lobby.”
In the case of Legend, Dixon claims that while Reid initially showed some interest in the singer after Dixon played a demo for him, her subsequent refusals to join him in his hotel room led Reid to no-show at Legend’s audition as punishment.
“Once she realized Mr. Reid would continue to stifle her career and the prospects of any of the artists she brought to him and that he would continue to undermine the artists she had already signed like Toya in order to punish Ms. Dixon for rejecting his sexual pressures, Ms. Dixon gave up not just on Arista, but on her dream of starting a label,” the complaint reads. “She left Arista to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2002. Resigned to the fact that she would not ever be able to function in the music industry without being sexualized.”
Dixon claims that after graduating from Harvard with honors in 2004, she joined Legend as a GM at his Homeschool Records, where she worked with the singer to co-executive produce Estelle‘s U.S. debut album, Shine, and arranged for West to record a feature on the Grammy-winning single “American Boy.” However, while working on the promotion of the album with staff at Atlantic Records, she claims coming into contact with Reid and Simmons’ “enablers” at the label “triggered depression” and caused her to retreat from the industry once again.
According to the complaint, Dixon came into contact with Reid once more, during his tenure as chairman/CEO at Island Def Jam, when she was trying to kickstart a career as a songwriter-producer. Claiming she “still had not worked through the abuse she had experienced in the music industry,” she says she set up a meeting with Reid to play a demo of her songs with the hope of placing them with some of his artists. During the meeting, she said Reid “insisted that she stand up and sing for him” despite coming to him as a songwriter-producer, leading to the return of “the crass feeling of being objectified” by Reid. “No amount of time, education, marital status, or additional hit records would undo the harm of the assaults,” the complaint reads.
Dixon says the legacy of Reid’s assaults is ongoing. In 2017, after starting her own label, The Ninth Floor, she alleges that an unnamed label executive who initially “appeared to love” the music of her artist, Ella Wylde, cut off communications after allegedly learning of Dixon’s history with Reid.
“Mr. Reid’s looming presence and power in the music industry affects Ms. Dixon in the present day,” the complaint reads. “As she attempts to participate in new dimensions of the industry such as the highly lucrative music royalty space where her combination of A&R chops and her Harvard MBA should make her a highly employable senior professional, Ms. Dixon has been told that although she is well-known, well-respected, and highly qualified, she is essentially blackballed because she has spoken out against Mr. Simmons and Mr. Reid. Thus, the harm is ongoing and unceasing.”
Dixon is suing Reid for sexual battery/assault, false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress and gender-motivated violence. She is demanding a trial by jury.
Representatives for Reid’s current company, mega, did not return a request for comment at press time.
Though Dixon’s assault claims against Reid are new, Reid’s image began to crumble in 2017 when the then-Epic Records head was accused of sexually harassing one of his female assistants. That allegation led to Reid’s exit from the label, where it was alleged that other executives knew of his conduct but did nothing to stop it. Since that time, Reid has continued to work in the industry, launching the HitCo label alongside Charles Goldstuck before selling it to Concord in 2022. Earlier this year, Reid launched mega, a music collective co-founded by Usher which is distributed by Larry Jackson‘s gamma.
In 2020, Reid, also an accomplished record producer, sold his music catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Fund and joined the company’s advisory board.
Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.
Former Recording Academy president/CEO Neil Portnow has been sued by an unnamed female musician who says he drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2018. Also named as a defendant is the Recording Academy itself, which the plaintiff accuses of enabling the assault through negligence.
In the lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court on Wednesday (Nov. 8), the woman — described in the complaint as “an internationally acclaimed musician, inventor, and former member of The Recording Academy” who performed at Carnegie Hall in 2015 — claims that while meeting with Portnow in his hotel room in June 2018 to conduct an interview with him for her magazine, she “began to feel woozy” after drinking a glass of wine he offered her.
When the woman allegedly attempted to exit Portnow’s hotel room, she claims Portnow refused to help her leave “while begging her to stay” and attempting to kiss and massage her body. After allegedly losing consciousness, she says she would periodically wake to find Portnow sexually assaulting her in his hotel bed, forcing her hand to “manipulate” his penis and penetrating her vagina with both his penis and fingers.
The woman claims she awoke the next morning “woozy and confused” in the hotel bed as Portnow took a phone call. Once he finished the call, she claims Portnow “begged” her to stay in the hotel room “and under his control” but that she resisted. She says she gathered her things and made her escape after he left.
According to the complaint, the woman first met Portnow in January 2018 at the Paley Center for Media in New York, where he was speaking on a panel at an event for the 50th annual Grammy Awards. One week later, she says she received two VIP tickets to the Grammys and afterparty access from Portnow’s secretary, though she was unable to attend.
In February 2018, the woman says she emailed Portnow to thank him for the tickets, apologize for not being able to attend and tell him about her magazine. She says Portnow subsequently reached out to her in May 2018 telling her that he was traveling to New York City, at which point she told him she was interested in interviewing him for her magazine — leading to their alleged June 2018 meeting in his hotel room.
“In the immediate aftermath” of the alleged assault, the plaintiff says she tried reaching out to Portnow several times “to understand and gain clarity as to what had occurred,” but that Portnow ignored her and returned to Los Angeles around June 15, 2018.
The woman further claims that in October 2018, she emailed the Recording Academy to notify them of the assault and received an email response from the Academy’s chief people and culture officer (a position then filled by Gaetano Frizzi) “asking for a phone call to discuss the allegations.” She claims, however, that no one from the Academy ever reached out to interview her.
The following month, the woman says she received an email from Portnow’s legal representative that contained a private message from Portnow. According to a copy of the email which is included in the complaint, Portnow does not directly mention the woman’s assault allegation but instead expresses that he was “deeply saddened by your communications which unfortunately now require me to have an attorney involved.” Portnow also states that he had “always respected” the defendant and that “it is important that we hear each other with compassion and care.”
In December 2018, the woman says she filed a police report with the New York City Police Department naming Portnow as the man who sexually assaulted her.
In the aftermath of the alleged rape, the woman claims she “has suffered and will continue to suffer, great pain of mind and body, severe and permanent emotional distress, physical manifestations of emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation, physical, personal & psychological injuries.” She also says she has “incurred and will continue to incur expenses for psychological treatment, therapy, and counselling,” “has and/or will incur loss of income and/or loss of earning capacity in her musical career” and was “unable to maintain” her status as an Academy voting member.
The woman is suing Portnow for sexual battery; the Recording Academy for negligent hiring, supervision and retention; and both defendants for gender-motivated violence. She is demanding a trial by jury.
In a lengthy statement sent to Billboard, a spokesperson for Portnow called the woman’s allegations “completely false.”
“The claims are the product of the Plaintiff’s imagination and undoubtedly motivated by Mr. Portnow’s refusal to comply with the Plaintiff’s outrageous demands for money and assistance in obtaining a residence visa for her.
“A series of erratic, bizarre text messages and e-mails to both Mr. Portnow and the Recording Academy from the Plaintiff had already persuaded numerous previous Plaintiff’s lawyers who resigned, as well as a police agency, that her claims were baseless. The latest incarnation offers a ‘new and improved’ story, padding it with even more outrageous and untrue allegations.
“More than 5 years later, Mr. Portnow remains consistent in his refusal to assist the Plaintiff in her absurd demands that he help her in procuring a United States permanent resident visa, marry her, make children with her, support her musical career, or pay her millions of dollars so that she would not bring her frivolous lawsuit.
“When the first attempt was made to extract money and other benefits as listed above, Mr. Portnow, who was at that time President/CEO of the Recording Academy, immediately enlisted the Academy’s HR Department to review the nonsensical text messages and emails that he made immediately available. An outside independent investigation led by top-tier lawyers, reviewed all relevant texts, emails, interviewed witnesses, and found absolutely no proof to support any of the allegations. The Academy’s Executive Committee and Board of Trustees were made aware of the results of the investigation and report; subsequently, Mr. Portnow served at the helm of the Recording Academy for the balance of the term of his contract. Throughout these processes, Mr. Portnow voluntarily and fully cooperated with and supported the investigation of these false allegations.
“Accordingly, Mr. Portnow will defend the case with vigor and will prevail.”
The Recording Academy sent the following statement to Billboard: “We continue to believe the claims to be without merit and intend to vigorously defend the Academy in this lawsuit.”
The woman’s allegations were partially aired nearly four years ago in the explosive discrimination complaint filed by Deborah Dugan, who briefly replaced Portnow as Recording Academy president/CEO after he stepped down in August 2019. The following January, Dugan was placed on administrative leave, after which she filed a discrimination complaint against the Academy with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In that complaint — details from which are outlined in the new lawsuit — Dugan claimed that during a May 2019 meeting of the board prior to assuming Academy leadership, she was informed that sexual assault allegations had been lodged against Portnow by a foreign female recording artist who was also a member of the Academy. Dugan alleged that she was placed on leave after she refused to bring Portnow back as a consultant for the Grammys.
Shortly after Dugan filed her complaint, Portnow released a statement calling the rape allegations “ludicrous, and untrue. The suggestion that there was is disseminating a lie.” He added that following “an in-depth independent investigation” of the allegations, he was “completely exonerated.”
Dugan and the Recording Academy reached a confidential settlement in June 2021.
Migos rapper Offset is facing a lawsuit that claims he assaulted a security guard two years ago at Complex’s yearly Los Angeles festival. In a complaint filed Tuesday (Nov . 7) in Los Angeles court, Daveon Clark says he was attacked by Offset (real name Kiari Kendrell Cephus) and fellow rapper YRN Murk (real name […]
With Young Thug’s gang trial set to start later this month, Atlanta prosecutors are defending their plans to cite his rap lyrics as evidence against him — including by arguing that a manifesto written by the infamous Unabomber would not be inadmissible in court merely if it had been “set to music.”
Thug’s lawyers say his music should be off-limits at the upcoming trial, echoing widespread criticism that the tactic violates the First Amendment and unfairly sways juries. But with a judge set to decide that issue this week, prosecutors aren’t exactly shying away from the controversial practice.
In a motion filed Friday (Nov. 3), the Fulton County District Attorney’s office argued that the lyrics are clearly fair game because they allegedly show Thug (real name Jeffery Williams) and others admitting to being members of a criminal enterprise called YSL — the very crime they’re accused of committing.
“Gang lyric evidence pertaining to the predicate offenses, YSL, its rivals, expectations, and behaviors are all highly pertinent to the defendants’ states of mind and intent in this case,” the DA’s office wrote. “The defendants associated with YSL for criminal purposes.”
In making those arguments, prosecutors also attacked the broader claim that rap music is often unfairly targeted in criminal cases. They accused Thug’s lawyers of seeking an unreasonable “genre-based blanket exclusion” against any evidence that was set “to a beat” — an outcome they said would lead to “an absurd result.” To illustrate how “ridiculous” that position is, prosecutors made a striking comparison.
“Taken to its logical outcome, the defense would seem to opine that if the Unabomber’s manifesto had been set to music, it could not be used against him in any court,” the DA’s office wrote. “According to the defense’s argument, had the Turner Diaries been read with background music, it could not have been introduced against Timothy McVeigh.”
The “Unabomber” refers to terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who killed three and injured dozens by mailing bombs to victims between 1978 and 1995. McVeigh was the white supremacist behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, which left 168 people dead, including 19 children.
In court documents, prosecutors also laid out exactly which Thug lyrics they plan to quote in court during the trial, including: “F– the snitches, need to be in ditches”; “Gave the lawyer close to 2 mil’ he handle all the killings;” and “I was a capo in my hood way before a plaque or a mention.” Prosecutors also listed many other lyrics, including by other YSL members, that they might reference to jurors.
Civil liberties activists and defense attorneys have long criticized the use of rap lyrics to win criminal convictions. They argue that it unfairly targets constitutionally protected speech, treating hyperbolic verse as literal confessions; they also say it can unfairly sway juries by tapping into racial biases.
Lawmakers in California passed legislation last year restricting the use of rap lyrics and other creative expression as evidence in criminal cases, and a federal bill in Congress that would impose similar restrictions has been widely supported by the music industry. But absent such statutes, courts around the country have mostly upheld the right of prosecutors to cite rap lyrics, particularly in gang-related cases.
Thug and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that his “YSL” group was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life.” Prosecutors claim the group committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
After months of delays, a jury was finally seated last week, clearing the way for the trial to kick off on Nov. 27 against Thug and five other remaining defendants. But before then, Judge Ural Glanville must decide on whether the jury can hear his lyrics as part of the prosecution’s case.
In a motion last year, Thug’s attorney, Brian Steel, argued that using the lyrics as evidence was “racist and discriminatory” and would leave the jury “poisoned” against his client. The use of that term was perhaps an allusion to a 2014 ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which overturned a shooting conviction on the grounds that “inflammatory rap verses” had risked “poisoning the jury against the defendant.”
“The admission and use of these lyrics/poetry/artistry against Mr. Williams in his upcoming trial would be a Constitutional violation and an abuse of discretion,” Steele wrote last year in his motion to exclude them from the case. “Mr. Williams has the absolute right, like all persons in America, to exercise lawful speech/expression.”
A hearing over the admissibility of lyrics is set for Wednesday morning (Nov. 8).
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Mariah Carey is hit with a copyright lawsuit over “All I Want for Christmas Is You”; a federal appeals court issues a first-of-its-kind ruling on copyright protections for dance routines; Taylor Swift gets named-dropped at the Supreme Court; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Mariah Sued Over Iconic Christmas Track (Again)
Just in time for the holidays, Mariah Carey is facing rebooted allegations that she ripped off her perennially-chart-topping “All I Want for Christmas Is You” from an earlier song of the same name.
Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey last summer, claiming her 1994 holiday blockbuster infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. But the bare-bones complaint included few details about the alleged infringement, and the case was quickly dropped a few months later.
Now, Stone is back — both with new lawyers and with a more fleshed-out lawsuit.
Those new attorneys hail from Gerard Fox Law, the same firm that represented two songwriters in their lawsuit accusing Taylor Swift of stealing the lyrics to “Shake It Off” from 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play,” which also featured lyrics about “playas” and “haters.” After five years of litigation against the biggest pop star in the world, including a successful trip to the Ninth Circuit, Stone has certainly found himself battle-tested plaintiff lawyers to go after Carey.
And where the original complaint was short on specifics, the new one is chock full of them, including that she made up the story of how she wrote the song and that her own co-writer, Walter Afanasieff, has disputed that story.
“Carey has without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance’s new lawyers wrote in the re-filed complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun. This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
Go read our entire story here, including the full complaint filed against Carey.
Other top stories this week…
CHOREOGRAPHY COPYRIGHTS – The Ninth Circuit issued a first-of-its-kind ruling on copyright protections for dance routines, reviving a case that accuses Fortnite creator Epic Games of stealing copyrighted moves from choreographer Kyle Hanagami, who’s worked with BTS, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears. The decision came after years of efforts by other dancers to secure better ownership of their routines, including Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion choreographer JaQuel Knight, as detailed by Rebecca Milzoff in her excellent 2020 Billboard cover story.
SCOTUS SWIFTIES? – Capping a year in which Taylor Swift’s name has dropped on Capitol Hill, at the Department of Justice and on NFL broadcasts, it came up last week during Supreme Court arguments in a major case over social media and the First Amendment, as part of legal hypothetical raised by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
YSL CASE SET FOR TRIAL – After months of delays, a jury was finally seated in the massive criminal case against Young Thug and other alleged members of an Atlanta street gang, clearing the way for a trial to begin later this month. But will it feature rap lyrics as evidence? Stay tuned this week…
STEVEN TYLER ACCUSED AGAIN – The Aerosmith frontman was hit with a second lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting a minor decades ago, this time by a woman who says he forcibly kissed and groped her in New York City in 1975 when she was just 17.
AI FAIR USE ARGUMENT – Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic PBC told the U.S. Copyright Office this week that the massive scraping of copyrighted materials to train AI models ought to be considered “quintessentially lawful” – perhaps offering a preview of arguments the company will make in its upcoming legal battle with Universal Music Group (UMG) over those very same issues.
TICKET BOT CRACKDOWN – As reported by Billboard’s Dave Brooks, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced that she would roll out new legislation to beef up the BOTS ACT — a rarely-enforced 2016 law that outlawed the use of bots to attack ticket sales and jump the line to buy tickets ahead of consumers. If passed, the amendment will create a new forum for online ticket sellers to report successful bot attacks to the Federal Trade Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the statute.
CONTRACT RESTRICTIONS (TAYLOR’S VERSION) – Will trying to prevent the next ‘Taylor’s Version’ backfire on record labels? Following up on Steve Knopper’s reporting on new contractual restrictions pushed by labels in the wake of Taylor Swift‘s massively-successful re-recording campaign, music attorney Chris Castle argues that record companies might want to think twice.
Offering a preview of arguments the company might make in its upcoming legal battle with Universal Music Group (UMG), artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic PBC told the U.S. Copyright Office this week that the massive scraping of copyrighted materials to train AI models is a “quintessentially lawful.”
Music companies, songwriters and artists have argued that such training represents an infringement of their works at a vast scale, but Anthropic told the federal agency Monday (Oct. 30) that it was clearly allowed under copyright’s fair use doctrine.
“The copying is merely an intermediate step, extracting unprotectable elements about the entire corpus of works, in order to create new outputs,” the company wrote. “This sort of transformative use has been recognized as lawful in the past and should continue to be considered lawful in this case.”
The filing came as part of an agency study aimed at answering thorny questions about how existing intellectual property laws should be applied to the disruptive new tech. Other AI giants, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Google and Stability AI all lodged similar filings, explaining their views.
But Anthropic’s comments will be of particular interest in the music industry because that company was sued last month by UMG over the very issues in question in the Copyright Office filing. The case, the first filed over music, claims that Anthropic unlawfully copied “vast amounts” of copyrighted songs when it trained its Claude AI tool to spit out new lyrics.
In the filing at the Copyright Office, Anthropic argued that such training was a fair use because it copied material only for the purpose of “performing a statistical analysis of the data” and was not “re-using the copyrighted expression to communicate it to users.”
“To the extent copyrighted works are used in training data, it is for analysis (of statistical relationships between words and concepts) that is unrelated to any expressive purpose of the work,” the company argued.
UMG is sure to argue otherwise, but Anthropic said legal precedent was clearly on its side. Notably, the company cited a 2015 ruling by a federal appeals court that Google was allowed to scan and upload millions of copyrighted books to create its searchable Google Books database. That ruling and others established the principle that “large-scale copying” was a fair use when done to “create tools for searching across those works and to perform statistical analysis.”
“The training process for Claude fits neatly within these same paradigms and is fair use,” Anthropic’s lawyers wrote. “Claude is intended to help users produce new, distinct works and thus serves a different purpose from the pre-existing work.”
Anthropic acknowledged that the training of AI models could lead to “short-term economic disruption.” But the company said such problems were “unlikely to be a copyright issue.”
“It is still a matter that policymakers should take seriously (outside of the context of copyright) and balance appropriately against the long-term benefits of LLMs on the well-being of workers and the economy as a whole by providing an entirely new category of tools to enhance human creativity and productivity,” the company wrote.
Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler is facing a second lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting a minor decades ago, this time by a woman who says he forcibly kissed and groped her in New York City in 1975.
In a complaint filed Thursday (Nov. 2) in New York court, former teen model Jeanne Bellino says she has suffered “severe and permanent emotional distress” over the incidents, which allegedly occurred over a single day in the summer of 1975 when she was 17 and Tyler was 27.
“By 1975, Tyler had acquired wealth, stature, and power as a result of his career and status as a rock star,” Bellino’s lawyers write. “Tyler used his power, influence, and authority, as a well-known musician to sexually assault Plaintiff.”
In her lawsuit, Bellino claims that she and a friend had arranged to meet Aerosmith in Manhattan. While they were allegedly walking down Sixth Avenue with his entourage, she says Tyler pushed her into a phone booth.
“While holding her captive, Tyler stuck his tongue down her throat, and put his hands upon her body, her breasts, her buttocks, and her genitals, moving and removing clothing and pinning her against the wall of the phone booth,” her lawyers write. “As Tyler was mauling and groping Plaintiff, he was humping her pretending to have sex with Plaintiff.”
During the incident, Bellino says she could feel that “Tyler’s penis was erect and it was evident to her as he rubbed it against her that he was not wearing underwear and wearing thin pants.”
Because she was “relying upon her friend for transportation,” the woman’s lawyers say, a “dazed, confused, and shocked” Bellino continued with the group to the Warwick Hotel, where the band was allegedly staying.
“At the hotel, they entered through a bar entrance and there, Steven Tyler again pinned Plaintiff against the wall, put his tongue down her throat and started humping Plaintiff, simulating sex,” the lawsuit says.
Tyler then allegedly left and returned to his room, telling Bellino he would call her up later. Sitting in the lobby “sobbing and afraid,” she alleges that a call eventually came, but she says she instead fled the hotel with the help of a doorman and a sympathetic cab driver, who took her home to Queens. She claims she “immediately shared the horror she suffered with her sister, still crying uncontrollably.”
“As a result of the sexual assault, Plaintiff was hospitalized and medicated,” her lawyers write. “Plaintiff has continued to require medication to cope with the sexual assault and has suffered long term physical injury associated with the trauma.”
A rep for Tyler did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
The new case comes just under a year after Tyler was sued by Julia Holcomb, who claims that the rocker repeatedly assaulted her for three years starting in 1973, when she was just 16 years old. Holcomb claims to be the girl Tyler referred to in his memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, when he wrote he “almost took a teen bride” and convinced her parents to grant him guardianship over her.
“She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it,” Tyler wrote in the book passage that’s quoted in the lawsuit.
Tyler has denied the accusations and moved to dismiss the case in April. However, his arguments raised eyebrows at the time, as one of his defenses was that he was immunized against the allegations because he had been granted legal custody over Holcomb.
Like Holcomb’s case, Bellino’s new lawsuit cites a so-called look-back law that allows alleged victims to bring cases that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations. Bellino cites the Gender Motivated Violence Act, which was amended last year to add a two-year lookback window that began on March 1.
Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.
A jury was finally seated Wednesday in the sweeping RICO case in Atlanta against Young Thug and other alleged members of a street gang called YSL, clearing the way for a trial to begin in late November after months of delays.
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At the end of a hearing in Fulton County Superior Court, Judge Ural Glanville swore in a jury to hear the case, in which prosecutors allege that Young Thug (Jeffery Williams) and his YSL were not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life.”
The process of picking a jury began way back in January, but the effort was repeatedly delayed as the court struggled to find jurors who could commit to the massive case. With a trial expected to last many months, many prospective jurors successfully argued that they could not afford to halt their lives, citing the need to earn money, childcare commitments and health problems.
The original indictment, filed in May 2022 by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, named Thug and 27 other alleged gang members as defendants, but the upcoming trial will feature just seven. Many defendants have pleaded out of the case, including fellow star rapper Gunna (Sergio Kitchens), who accepted a plea deal last December. Others have been split from the proceedings into separate cases.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Judge Glanville said the opening statements in the trial would kick off on Nov. 27. The jury is composed of seven Black women, two white women, two Black men and one white man, according to reports by Atlanta media outlets including the local NBC affiliate.
The YSL case is built around Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law based on the more famous federal RICO statute that’s been used to target the mafia, drug cartels and other forms of organized crime. Such laws make it easier for prosecutors to sweep up many members of an alleged criminal conspiracy based on many smaller acts that aren’t directly related. Notably, it’s the same statute that Willis is using to prosecute former President Donald Trump and several associates over allegations that tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Thug and the other defendants are accused of violating the Georgia RICO law through numerous individual “predicate acts,” including murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade, as well as other separate charges. Thug also faces several other charges over guns, drugs and other materials allegedly found in his home when he was arrested.
If fully convicted, he could face a life sentence. He’s already been in jail for 17 months since the indictment was handed down, after the judge repeatedly refused to grant him pre-trial release on bond.
Beyond indicting two of rap’s biggest stars, the YSL case also made waves because it cited their lyrics as supposed evidence of their crimes — a controversial practice that critics say unfairly sways juries and injects racial bias into the courtroom. California recently restricted the tactic in that state, but Willis has strongly defended using it against Young Thug.
The extent to which prosecutors can present lyrics as evidence at the upcoming trial is not yet settled. A hearing next week is scheduled to hear arguments from both sides before a ruling is issued ahead of the Nov. 27 start date.