Katy Perry has won her appeal in a copyright case over her 2013 hit Dark Horse.
The musician will no longer have to pay $2.8m (£2.1m) to the rapper Flame (real name Marcus Gray), who claimed that her single plagiarised an eight-note ostinato from his 2009 song Joyful Noise.
Gray sued Perry and co-defendants including Capitol Records in 2016 and was initially awarded $2.8m in a jury verdict three years later. But Perry appealed and a federal district court judge vacated the verdict in March 2020.
A judge from the ninth circuit court of appeals has now ruled that Gray was attempting to claim an “improper monopoly” over conventional “musical building blocks”.
The ostinatos in Perry and Gray’s respective songs “consist entirely of commonplace musical elements, and … the similarities between them do not arise out of an original combination of these elements”, the new ruling reads.
The judge ruled that to allow copyright over this material would limit musical creativity and amount “to allowing an improper monopoly over two-note pitch sequences or even the minor scale itself, especially in light of the limited number of expressive choices available when it comes to an eight-note repeated musical figure”.
The ruling in Perry’s favour comes amid a renewed flush of A-list musicians facing copyright lawsuits. Ed Sheeran has been defending allegations that he copied parts of his 2017 hit Shape of You from a song written by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue in the high court this week.
Dua Lipa is facing two lawsuits over her 2020 hit single Levitating, one brought by a Florida reggae band, the other by two disco songwriters. Sam Smith and Normani have also been sued for allegedly copying elements of a song by Jordan Vincent, Christopher Miranda and Rosco Banlaoi for their 2019 hit Dancing With a Stranger.
