{"id":712,"date":"2024-05-14T14:43:47","date_gmt":"2024-05-14T14:43:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/childish-gambino-beats-lawsuit-claiming-he-stole-this-is-america\/"},"modified":"2024-05-16T16:14:43","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T16:14:43","slug":"childish-gambino-beats-lawsuit-claiming-he-stole-this-is-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/childish-gambino-beats-lawsuit-claiming-he-stole-this-is-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Childish Gambino Beats Lawsuit Claiming He Stole \u2018This Is America\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit accusing Donald Glover<\/strong> of ripping off his chart-topping Childish Gambino<\/a> hit \u201cThis Is America\u201d from an earlier song.<\/p>\n

In a ruling Friday, the U.S. Court<\/a> of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a judge\u2019s decision last year dismissing the lawsuit, which claimed that Glover\u2019s 2018 song was \u201cpractically identical\u201d to a 2016 track called \u201cMade In America\u201d by a rapper named Kidd Wes<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The earlier ruling said Glover had done nothing wrong because the two songs were\u00a0\u201centirely different.\u201d But in Friday\u2019s decision, the appeals court rejected the case for even simpler reasons: that Wes (Emelike Nwosuocha) had failed to secure the proper copyrights<\/a> on his track.<\/p>\n

\u201cNwosuocha\u2019s problem is that his copyright registration is simply for the wrong work,\u201d the appeals court wrote. \u201cThat distinction is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Released in 2018, \u201cThis Is America\u201d 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 music video, directed by Hiro Murai<\/strong>, that touched on issues of race, mass shootings and police violence.<\/p>\n

Nwosuocha sued in May 2021, claiming there were \u201cunmissable\u201d similarities between the song and his own \u201cMade In America,\u201d including the \u201cflow\u201d \u2014 the cadence, rhyming schemes, rhythm and other characteristics of hip hop lyrics. But in March 2023 ruling, Judge Victor Marrero<\/strong> sharply disagreed with the lawsuit\u2019s allegations.<\/p>\n

\u201cA cursory comparison with the challenged composition reveals that the content of the choruses is entirely different and not substantially similar,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cMore could be said on the ways these songs differ, but no more airtime is needed to resolve this case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nwosuocha appealed that ruling, seeking to revive his lawsuit against Glover. But in rejecting that appeal on Friday, the Second Circuit ruled that it didn\u2019t even need to decide whether the songs were similar. Instead, it said the case also failed because Nwosuocha had secured a federal copyright registration only for the recording of the song, not for the underlying composition that he claimed Glover had copied.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe distinction between a sound recording and a musical work is not just an administrative classification,\u201d the judge wrote. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barring an unlikely trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, Friday\u2019s ruling will permanently end Nwosuocha\u2019s lawsuit against Glover. Neither side immediately returned a request for comment on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit accusing Donald Glover of ripping off his chart-topping Childish Gambino hit \u201cThis Is America\u201d from an earlier song. In a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":713,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1093,1091,1089,1092,1090,303,471],"class_list":["post-712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-america","tag-beats","tag-childish","tag-claiming","tag-gambino","tag-lawsuit","tag-stole"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":755,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/712\/revisions\/755"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}