{"id":8205,"date":"2025-10-17T15:38:29","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T15:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/french-montana-wins-sampling-lawsuit-despite-indistinguishable-beat\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T16:26:44","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T16:26:44","slug":"french-montana-wins-sampling-lawsuit-despite-indistinguishable-beat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/french-montana-wins-sampling-lawsuit-despite-indistinguishable-beat\/","title":{"rendered":"French Montana Wins Sampling Lawsuit, Despite ‘Indistinguishable’ Beat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tA federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit that accused French Montana<\/a> of illegally sampling on his hit \u201cAin\u2019t Worried About Nothin\u2019\u201d \u2013 even though the beats of the two tracks sound \u201cindistinguishable\u201d to the \u201cnaked ear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEddie Lee Richardson<\/strong> (aka Hotwire The Producer) had claimed that French\u2019s 2013 hit ripped off his instrumental song \u201cHood Pushin\u2019 Weight.\u201d But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled Thursday that Richardson had technically failed to prove his case.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cWe agree with Richardson that HPW\u2019s beat, to the naked ear, seems indistinguishable from the beat in AWAN,\u201d Judge Candace Jackson-Akiwumi wrote for a three-judge panel. \u201cYet, opinions and allegations unsupported by facts are not enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe appeals court\u2019s ruling upheld an earlier decision by a lower judge, who noted the same clear similarities between the songs \u2013 but also the same legal shortcomings: \u201cIf it is any consolation, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,\u201d that judge wrote last year.<\/p>\n

\n\tRichardson sued French in 2019, claiming the star and others stole core elements from \u201cHood Pushin\u2019 Weight\u201d \u2013 an instrumental track Richardson published in 2012 on the platform SoundClick \u2013 when they wrote \u201cAin\u2019t Worried About Nothin\u2019,\u201d which reached No. 14 on Billboard\u2019s Hot Rap Songs chart in August 2013.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Richardson\u2019s allegations had a fatal flaw: he had only secured a copyright registration for his song\u2019s sound recording<\/em>, not for the underlying musical composition<\/em>. Under U.S. copyright law, such recordings are only infringed if they are directly copied, or sampled, in a new track \u2013 and not when a new artist merely imitates their musical elements in a new record.<\/p>\n

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\n\tLast year, Judge Nancy L. Maldonado dismissed Richardson\u2019s case on those grounds, saying he had failed to show such direct sampling of his sound recording. In doing so, she included an unusual sympathetic note at the end of the ruling, stressing that it was merely a \u201ctechnical win\u201d for French \u2014 and one that he \u201cshould not claim as a substantive victory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe court hopes that Richardson will not be deterred in his musical endeavors, now armed with a better understanding of copyright law,\u201d the judge wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThursday\u2019s decision upheld that earlier ruling, saying that the owner of a sound recording must show that an alleged infringer \u201cactually copied the specific digital sound elements in the work at issue.\u201d The appellate court said Richardson \u201cfailed to supply facts\u201d to support such an argument.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRichardson could have presented either direct or indirect evidence to succeed in his claim that Kharbouch duplicated HPW in producing AWAN,\u201d Judge Jackson-Akiwumi wrote, specifically noting that he had failed to depose French. \u201cRichardson has presented neither.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut the ruling echoed the earlier judge\u2019s sympathetic tone. Refusing to force Richardson to repay French\u2019s legal bills \u2013 typical in losing copyright cases \u2014 the judge said the accuser had \u201cgenuinely believed\u201d that the star had copied his beat, and had simply \u201cfailed to appreciate the technical differences between a sound recording and music composition copyright.\u201d<\/p>\n


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A federal appeals court has rejected a lawsuit that accused French Montana of illegally sampling on his hit \u201cAin\u2019t Worried About Nothin\u2019\u201d \u2013 even though the beats of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3335,2855,6897,303,2856,2676,882],"class_list":["post-8205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-beat","tag-french","tag-indistinguishable","tag-lawsuit","tag-montana","tag-sampling","tag-wins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205","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=8205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8232,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8205\/revisions\/8232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}