‘Uptown Funk’ copied 80s R&B hit, claims suit
Record producer Mark Ronson has been accused of copyright infringement over the song “Uptown Funk”.
Lastrada Entertainment Company, which owns the right to “More Bounce to the Ounce”, a song written by funk musician Roger Troutman, filed a claim at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday, September 12.
“Uptown Funk”, which features Bruno Mars on vocals, was released in 2014.
“More Bounce to the Ounce” was released as part of an album called “Zapp” in 1980. The group Zapp was comprised of Troutman and his brothers.
According to the claim, Troutman’s song has become “hugely influential”, and has been sampled over 200 times, including by hip hop artists Notorious B.I.G., Ice Cube, Public Enemy, EPMD, Mos Def, and T-Pain.
“Mark Ronson failed in his goal to write something new. Substantial parts of ‘Uptown Funk’ were copied from ‘More Bounce to the Ounce’”, alleged Lastrada.
Troutman’s song was “substantially reproduced” in the first 48 seconds of “Uptown Funk”, claimed Lastrada, along with “virtually the entire guitar part, bass melody and vocoder [synthesizer] part”.
The claim added: “The tradition of English musicians copying the musical works of blues musicians has a long history, going back to the 1960s.”
Lastrada cited how Ronson, in a recent TED Talk lecture, compared his own copying of his musical influences to “the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day”.
This isn’t the first time Ronson has been hit with copyright claims over the song.
In October last year, Mars and Ronson were tangled up in a suit filed by Yours, Mine & Ours Music and the estates of Grady Wilkins and Lee Peters.
Wilkins and Peters were members of 1980s electro-funk band Collage. In 1983, Collage released an album called “Get In Touch”, which featured the song “Young Girls”.
The suit, which is still ongoing, said that Ronson and Mars’ song “is an obvious, strikingly and substantially similar copy of plaintiffs’ original composition”.
In May 2015, it was reported that The Gap Band had been given a writing credit on “Uptown Funk”, due to its similarities with their 1979 track “Oops, Up Side Your Head”.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox
Today’s top stories:
Kendall Jenner clothing range at centre of copyright lawsuit
Mixed result for Motorola Solutions in Federal Circuit ruling
Federal Circuit rejects Uber’s arbitration bid in Waymo fight
