Katy Perry Sued by Christian Rappers over Dark Horse track

Christian Rappers including Flame have claimed that Katy Perry's track Dark Horse is a rip-off of their track Joyful Noise.  The rappers claim that Katy Perry used the Joyful Noise 2008 track, which features Lecrae, without permission, tranishing its "devoutly religious message" with images of "witchcraft" and "black magic".  The Joyful Noise track comes from Flame's Grammy-nominated album Our World: Redeemed.

The Christian rappers include Flame aka Marcus Gray, Lecrae Moore, Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu and they are seeking damages from Perry, huest artist Juicy J, Capitol Records and songwriters Dr Luke and Max Martin for copyright infringement.  Court papers in St. Louis, Missouri, show that they also want an injunction and profits gained from the unauthorised use of their track, stating Perry had performed Dark Horse at sold-out concerts throughout the US and sold millions of copies as a result.

The hip-hop stars stated: -

"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...Indeed, the music video of Dark Horse generated widespread accusations of blasphemy and an online petition signed by more than 60,000 demanding removal of an offensive religious image from the video".

The video for Dark Horse was edited in February 2014 following the complaints by scrubbing out a pendant featuring the Arabic word for God.  More than 453 million have watched the official video on YouTube.

Note:

Copyright infringement is a serious claim, which on occasions seems to be overlooked, against the unauthorised use of copyright protected work that could include:

• literary works, including novels, instruction manuals, computer programs, song lyrics, newspaper articles and some types of database
• dramatic works, including dance or mime
• musical works
• artistic works, including paintings, engravings, photographs, sculptures, collages, architecture, technical drawings, diagrams, maps and logos
• layouts or typographical arrangements used to publish a work, for a book for instance
• recordings of a work, including sound and film
• broadcasts of a work
•  

It is therefore important to ensure that any material that you wish to use in not protected by copyright and, if it is, that you seek permission from the copyright owner before using it.