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11 October 2019CopyrightRory O'Neill

Katy Perry says she suffered a ‘miscarriage of justice’ in copyright trial

Katy Perry has labelled a jury’s decision to find her liable for copyright infringement over her song “Dark Horse” and award a Christian rapper $2.7 million in damages as a “grave miscarriage of justice”.

In a court filing, Perry and her co-defendants, including her record label Capitol, said that “no reasonable” jury could have found in rapper Marcus Gray’s favour.

Perry argued that Gray had “utterly failed” to prove that she had copied his work for her song “Dark Horse”, and that the court should enter a judgment as a matter of law in her favour.

Failing summary judgment, the court should “at a minimum” grant a new trial as the jury’s findings were “against the clear weight of the evidence,” the defendants argued.

According to the filing, the jury’s findings not only constitute a miscarriage of justice but pose a threat to the wider music industry.

The court now has an opportunity to “draw the line between the permissible use of commonplace and unprotectable expression in musical compositions, and copyright infringement,” the pop star said.

Gray sued Perry, her co-songwriters and Capitol Records in 2014, claiming that “Dark Horse” copied the beat of his 2008 track “Joyful Noise”.

The Christian rapper also took umbrage at the tone and content of the music video for “Dark Horse”.

“The devoutly religious message of ‘Joyful Noise’ has been irreparably tarnished by its association with the witchcraft, paganism, black magic, and Illuminati imagery evoked by the same music in ‘Dark Horse’,” Gray’s lawsuit claimed.

During the trial, Perry argued that Gray had not proven any substantial similarity between the songs, and that Gray did not even own the copyright for the beat of “Joyful Noise”, which was created by musician Chike Ojukwu.

Perry has now directed her ire at the jury which found her liable for infringing the track, saying that it sets a “dangerously wrong precedent if allowed to stand”.

According to Perry, Gray provided “no evidence whatsoever” to support the jury’s finding that “Joyful Noise” had been ‘widely disseminated’.

“No reasonable factfinder could have concluded that ‘Joyful Noise’ was so well-known that it could be reasonably inferred that defendants heard it, particularly in this digital age of content overload,” the filing said.

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More on this story

Copyright
1 November 2019   A celebrity photography agency is suing Katy Perry for $150,000 after the US singer posted a paparazzi shot of herself dressed as Hilary Clinton to her Instagram in 2016.
Copyright
9 January 2020   The Christian rapper at the heart of the “Dark Horse” copyright clash is attempting to bar the submission of an amicus brief by a group of musicologists, which he claims is “unabashedly partisan” to Katy Perry’s arguments.
Copyright
14 March 2022   Katy Perry will not need to pay $2.8 million to a rapper who accused her of copying a part of his song in her 2013 hit “Dark Horse”.