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: 2 Live Crew wins a trial to take back control of its music catalog; Young Thug’s attorney wins a decision overturning his criminal contempt conviction; Diddy faces ever more accusations of sexual abuse; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Termination Determination
2 Live Crew won a rare courtroom showdown over copyright law’s “termination right” — a crucial federal provision that allows songwriters and artists to take back the rights to their music decades after they sold them away to a company.
Termination has been at the heart of recent lawsuits involving Cher, Brian Wilson and Dwight Yoakam, and both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment faced class actions from artists pushing to take back their music en masse. Jay-Z recently invoked termination to win back his debut album, and it was also the core issue behind a new “landmark” copyright rule issued last year about who gets paid streaming royalties.
2 Live’s dispute kicked off in 2020 when Uncle Luke (Luther Campbell) and the heirs of two co-members invoked termination against Lil Joe Records, which bought the band’s catalog out of bankruptcy in the 1990s. The label fought back by suing the group in federal court, arguing that termination didn’t apply to the five albums at issue in the case.
Such disputes rarely reach a jury. But at a trial earlier this month, attorneys for Lil Joe argued that the protections of the bankruptcy sale had trumped any termination rights held by the members. 2 Live’s attorneys told a different story — one of “deceit and dishonesty” by Lil Joe’s owner that “wouldn’t be out of place in a Netflix movie.”
In their verdict, the jurors sided with 2 Live, allowing them to regain much of their catalog. Go read our entire story here to find out more.
Other top stories this week…
CONTEMPT CLEARED – Georgia’s Supreme Court sided with Brian Steel, an attorney serving as lead counsel to Young Thug in the rapper’s never-ending Atlanta gang trial, and reversed a ruling earlier this year that had held him in contempt of court. The decision will close a bizarre chapter in which Judge Ural Glanville sentenced Steel to 20 days in prison for refusing to reveal how he’d learned of a secret meeting between the judge and prosecutors — an incident that later saw Glanville removed from the case. But it won’t end the trial, which is already the longest in Georgia state history and has no end in sight.
PHOTOG STRIKES AGAIN – The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was hit with a lawsuit over allegations that the museum illegally displayed a copyrighted image of Van Halen snapped by veteran rock photographer Neil Zlozower. If that name sounds familiar, it should: Zlozower has filed more than fifty such lawsuits over the past decade, including cases against Universal Music Group, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Mötley Crüe and many others.
GOING HOME – Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory — a convicted drug trafficker and money-launderer involved in the early careers of rappers Jeezy and T.I. — was released from prison and will serve the remainder of his decades-long sentence in a halfway house. The rise and fall of Meech’s gang has been chronicled in 50 Cent’s Starz series BMF, on which Flenory’s son plays his father.
ALWAYS MORE DIDDY – Since you last heard from Legal Beat a week ago, there have three big developments in the story of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who currently stands accused of decades of sexual abuse:
- Combs was hit with another wave of six civil lawsuits, including several alleging assaults as late as 2022 and one claiming he assaulted a 13-year-old girl. The cases were the latest from two attorneys who had already filed six such lawsuits and warned earlier this month that they represent at least 120 other alleged victims.
- The new cases prompted Combs’ lawyer to ask the judge overseeing his criminal case to issue a gag order that would bar alleged victims and their attorneys from issuing “extrajudicial statements” about Combs to the press, arguing that such statements are threatening his right to a fair trial.
- Separately in the criminal case, the Combs team demanded a court order forcing the government to reveal the names of his alleged sexual abuse victims, arguing he cannot fairly defend himself without knowing their identities: “The government is forcing him, unfairly, to play a guessing a game.”
RAP SCION ARRESTED – T.I.‘s 20-year-old son Clifford “King” Harris Jr. was arrested in Georgia on an open warrant stemming from 2022 charges of speeding, driving with a suspended license and DUI. The incident was sparked when King almost hit a police car as he was pulling out of a gas station; the officers reported that they smelled cannabis when they approached his car and that he was found with a gun on his hip.