A federal appeals court dismissed a lawsuit accusing Donald Glover to uproot the top of the graph Children's Gambino hit “This Is America” from a previous song.
In a ruling Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judge's decision last year to dismiss the lawsuit, which claimed Glover's 2018 song was “virtually identical” to a 2016 track called “Made In America” by a rapper named Kid Wes.
The previous ruling said Glover had done nothing wrong because the two songs were “completely different”. But in Friday's ruling, the appeals court threw out the case on even simpler grounds: that Wes (Emelike Nwosuocha) hadn't properly copyrighted his piece.
“Nwosuocha's problem is that his copyright registration is simply for the wrong work,” the appeals court wrote. “This distinction is important.”
Released in 2018, “This Is America” spent two weeks atop the Hot 100 and eventually won Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. It was accompanied by a critically acclaimed, directed music video Hiro Muraiwhich touched on issues of race, mass shootings and police brutality.
Nwosuocha sued in May 2021, claiming there were “essential” similarities between the song and his own “Made In America,” including the “flow” — the rhythm, rhyme schemes, rhythm and other characteristics of hip lyrics hop. But in the decision of March 2023, Judge Victor Marrero strongly disagreed with the lawsuit's allegations.
“A cursory comparison with the disputed composition reveals that the content of the choruses is entirely different and not substantially similar,” the judge wrote. “More could be said about the ways in which these songs differ, but no more airtime is needed to resolve this case.”
Nwosuocha appealed the decision, seeking to revive his lawsuit against Glover. But in rejecting that appeal on Friday, the Second Circuit ruled that it didn't even have to decide whether the songs were similar. Instead, he said the case also failed because Nwosuocha had secured a federal copyright registration only for the recording of the song, not the underlying composition that he claimed Glover had copied.
“The distinction between a sound recording and a musical work is not merely an administrative classification,” the judge wrote. “This statutory distinction is important because sound recordings and musical works are different artistic works that can be copyrighted by different creators and are infringed in different ways.”
Barring an unlikely trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, Friday's ruling will permanently end Nwosuocha's lawsuit against Glover. Neither side immediately returned a request for comment Tuesday.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/childish-gambino-beats-lawsuit-this-is-america-appeals-court/
