Jay-Z fights off copyright infringement claim, again
US rapper Jay-Z has fought off a copyright infringement claim relating to his use of Egyptian song “Khosara”.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favour of Jay-Z yesterday, May 31.
In 2007, Egyptian individual Osama Fahmy sued Jay-Z (whose real name is Shawn Carter) for using samples of the song “Khosara” in his 1999 track “Big Pimpin’”.
The claim was filed at the US District Court for the Central District of California.
“Khosara” was created by Fahmy’s uncle, composer Baligh Hamdy, in 1957. Upon Hamdy’s death, Fahmy inherited the copyright to the song.
In October 2015, the district court entered an order granting Jay-Z’s motion for judgment as a matter of law, which was then appealed by Fahmy.
The district court held that Fahmy did not have any legal standing against Jay-Z. In a 2002 agreement, Fahmy transferred all of his economic rights to Egyptian individual Mohsen Jaber, which included the right to create derivative works adapted from “Khosara”.
The Ninth Circuit said yesterday: “To have standing to sue for copyright infringement alleged to have been done by Jay-Z’s adaptation of ‘Khosara’, Fahmy must have retained the exclusive right to prepare derivative works of ‘Khosara’, such as Big Pimpin’.”
In his defence, Fahmy relied on Egyptian “moral rights” to his uncle’s song. However, the appeals court agreed with the district court that moral rights are intended to protect the “presumed and intimate bond between authors and their works”.
It also agreed with the district court that moral rights are based on the notion that an author’s work is “almost universally understood to be an extension of the author’s personhood”.
As a result, moral rights protect the creator’s “personal or moral interests” in the work and are therefore not transferable to another party.
The appeals court concluded that any moral rights that Fahmy retained by Egyptian law are not enforceable in a US federal court. Even if they were, the court said that Fahmy had not complied with the compensation requirement of Egyptian law, which provides for injunctive relief only from an Egyptian court.
The court ruled that Fahmy lacked legal standing in the US to sue Jay-Z and dismissed the appeal.
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