settlement
French Montana has reached a settlement to end a lawsuit claiming his 2022 song “Blue Chills” features an unlicensed sample, resolving allegations that he’d tentatively agreed to pay for the clip but never actually did so.
Skylar Gudasz’s 2020 song “Femme Fatale” can be heard playing throughout French’s track — and in a lawsuit filed last year, she claimed the rapper’s reps initially offered to pay her for the sample. But she said French (Karim Kharbouch) then dropped “Blue Chills” without ever actually signing that deal.
In court filings on Wednesday (July 31), attorneys for both sides asked a federal judge to dismiss the case. Each side will pay their own costs, attorneys’ fees and expenses, but any of terms of the agreement were not disclosed in court filings.
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Neither side immediately returned requests for comment.
Gudasz claimed in her August 2023 lawsuit she had first been contacted about French using “Femme Fatale” in May 2022 by Deborah Mannis-Gardner, a well-known industry executive who has been called the “queen” of sample clearance. Gudasz said she and her lawyer then negotiated a deal in which she would receive more than $7,000 in upfront fees, an .08% cut on master royalties, and a 50% share of the copyright for French’s new composition.
But a month later, she claims that French, without notice, released the song “prior to finalizing and signing a licensing agreement.” Gudasz says that her lawyer quickly alerted Mannis-Gardner about the problem.
“Oh jeez,” Mannis-Gardner allegedly wrote in a response email, saying she would reach out to French’s attorney about the issue. But Gudasz says the situation was never resolved, claiming Mannis-Gardner “continued to maintain there would be a final agreement, sent emails finalizing the licensing agreement and requested invoices from plaintiff, which plaintiff timely sent … and even sent plaintiff a congratulatory email.”
“Despite repeated promises from defendants …. no signed agreement, fees, royalties, licensing agreements or monies have ever been sent to plaintiff,” Gudasz’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.
Gudasz says the aborted negotiations prove that French “knowingly infringed” the earlier song because they show that he was aware that he needed a license but chose to proceed without one. She claims that French even posted comments to Instagram congratulating her and acknowledged her role in “Blue Chills” on an episode of Apple Music’s Rap Life Radio.
In addition to French Montana, the lawsuit also named producer Harry Fraud (real name Rory William Quigley) as a defendant, as well Sony Music Entertainment and several other companies involved in French’s song. Mannis-Gardner was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit and was not accused of any wrongdoing.
Wednesday’s settlement resolves the lawsuit’s allegations against all defendants.
A federal judge has approved a $25 million settlement struck by vinyl producer Mobile Fidelity to resolve accusations that the company’s pricey “all analog” records were secretly created using digital methods, overruling objections from some customers that the settlement was “tainted by the stink of collusion.”
Though the deal would allow tens of thousands of MoFi customers to secure full refunds, some consumers argued that the deal was unfair — claiming it had been reached through a “reverse auction” in which MoFi bargained with “ineffectual” plaintiff’s lawyers to find the cheapest settlement possible.
But in a ruling Tuesday (May 9), U.S. District Judge James L. Robart rejected those claims and preliminarily approved the settlement deal. He said the agreement would likely fairly compensate any MoFi buyers who had been misled, and that there was no concrete evidence of impropriety in how it had been reached.
“The undisputed facts demonstrate that proposed settlement is not the product of a reverse auction or otherwise the result of collusion,” the judge wrote, saying it appeared to have been reached via “arm’s length negotiations” between attorneys for MoFi and the plaintiffs.
Among other things, the challengers had argued that the settlement’s payouts were insufficient based on how much they might have won at trial. But Judge Robart said those arguments ignored key factual details about how MoFi’s records were produced — and that such claims were at times “nonsensical.”
In a statement to Billboard, MoFi lead counsel Joseph J. Madonia said: “We appreciate the court’s ruling, which supports all of our claims that there was no reverse auction or collusion. As always MoFi continues its commitment to provide the best-sounding records possible.”
Attorneys for the consumers who challenged the settlement did not immediately return a request for comment.
The scandal at MoFi first erupted last summer, after Phoenix-area record store owner Mike Esposito posted a pair of videos to YouTube alleging that the company’s “all-analog” and “triple analog” records were in fact partially created using so-called direct stream digital technology. In one of the videos, MoFi’s engineers appeared to confirm that some digital tech had in fact been used in production.
As reported by The Washington Post, the digital revelations created “something of an existential crisis” in the analog-obsessed vinyl community. In a statement in late July, MoFi apologized for using “vague language” and for “taking for granted the goodwill and trust” of its customers: “We recognize our conduct has resulted in both anger and confusion in the marketplace. Moving forward, we are adopting a policy of 100% transparency regarding the provenance of our audio products.”
But the apology wasn’t enough to avoid litigation. In early August, a pair MoFi customers named Stephen J. Tuttle and Dustin Collman filed a proposed class action in Washington federal court, claiming the company’s analog branding had been “deceptive and misleading” and had duped them into paying premium prices. Four more cases were later filed in other federal courts by other groups of buyers.
In January, MoFi decided to settle the case. Calling the deal “a fair compromise,” the company agreed to let consumers either secure a full refund or keep their albums and instead take a 5% cash refund or a 10% refund in credit. The agreement would cover all customers nationwide, and the total money that could be paid out was “expected to be over $25 million.”
But some of the consumers who filed those other lawsuits quickly threw up red flags about the deal. They said the settlement was insufficient, struck without their input by bad lawyers who simply wanted a payout: “Despite this clear abdication of their duties to class members, counsel … are now trying to ram an inadequate, collusive settlement through this court.”
In Wednesday’s ruling, however, Judge Robart said those allegations had little basis. He pointed out there was “no evidence” that MoFi had “shopped” the case in search of a settlement — and that the plaintiffs’ lawyers had actually capped their own fees lower than necessary.
“This is one of the lower proposed fee awards this court has encountered in a class action settlement,” the judge wrote.
Following this week’s ruling, the settlement must still be granted final approval; during the process, the aggrieved MoFi buyers will still have additional chances to object to the terms of the deal or to opt out of it entirely. A hearing on final approval is tentatively set for October.
In a statement to Billboard, Duncan C. Turner — lead counsel for the customers that settled with MoFi — praised the judge’s decision: “There was never any substance to the intervenors’ made-up collusion story. The settlement terms are sound and fair, so we will be turning our attention to executing the notice program and getting the class members their compensation.”
50 Cent has reached a settlement to end a lawsuit in which he accused a Miami medical spa of falsely suggesting that he’d had penis surgery, according to court documents filed Friday (March 24).
The rapper claims that Angela Kogan and her Perfection Plastic Surgery & MedSpa exploited an innocent photo he’d “graciously agreed” to take with her to imply that he was a client — and, more startlingly, that he had received penile enhancement surgery as part of his work.
But in a joint filing made Friday in Miami federal court, attorneys for both 50 Cent (real name Curtis Jackson) and Kogan said they had “reached an agreement in principle to settle Mr. Jackson’s claims” and were “in the process of preparing an agreement to finalize and memorialize” the deal.
An attorney for 50 Cent did not immediately return a request for comment. A lawyer for Kogan declined to comment.
50 Cent sued Kogan in September, arguing that he took a photo with “someone he thought was a fan” and had “never consented” to the use of the image for commercial purposes in any form. He says Kogan not only posted the image to Instagram herself but also engineered an article on the website The Shade Room that used the post to make the “false insinuation” that she’d provided him with penile enhancement.
The article in question (“Penis Enhancements Are More Popular Than Ever & BBLs Are Dying Out: Cosmetic Surgery CEO Angela Kogan Speaks On It”) did not directly claim that Jackson had the surgery. But it allegedly said he was a “client” of the practice while repeatedly using the image of him with Kogan, leading Jackson’s lawyers to say the “implication was clear.”
“Defendants’ actions have exposed Jackson to ridicule, caused substantial damage to his professional and personal reputation, and violated his right to control his name and image,” the star’s lawyers wrote at the time. They included social media comments in which users mocked the rapper, including one that “crudely” said the rapper should be called “50 inch.”
Kogan strongly denied the allegations and immediately moved to dismiss the case, saying 50 Cent actually was a client and had consented to the use of the image as payment for the work he received. She argued it was just an “innocuous” use of the photo, not a direct suggestion that he’d endorsed the office.
But in December, Judge Robert N. Scola, Jr. denied Kogan’s request to toss out the case, saying that 50 Cent might eventually be able to prove his allegations at trial.
“As the proverbial saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words,” Scola wrote. “This one in particular depicts a worldwide celebrity next to Kogan with MedSpa’s name repeated all throughout the background. The promotional value is evident.”
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