As you may have guessed, a new lawsuit says she did. Heidi Merrill is suing Underwood, saying that NBC’s Sunday Night Football theme song, “Game On,” is a ripoff of Merrill’s own, “Game On” which she’d written a year or so earlier. Moreover the complaint includes that she met Mark Bright, Underwood’s producer, at an …

Jesse Braham, who is suing Taylor Swift for 40 million, surely believes that he has a fair point. He used a phrase that he thinks was pretty unique in his track, “Haters Gone Hate” and Taylor Swift, a few years later, used the same expression. And of course, here’s Taylor’s megahit. The two songs have …

What’s the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement? It’s largely a matter of what’s immoral as opposed to what’s illegal. Let’s take plagiarism first. When we throw out the term “plagiarism,” we mean “taking and passing off another person’s words or ideas as your own, without attribution (crediting the source),” and it’s considered wrong, immoral, …

The three legged stool and why you need a musicologist before you write that complaint. I don’t know. But looking at the court decision that threw this out, I’d have to say the plaintiff, Timothy Arnett, didn’t engage a musicologist, and didn’t have his ducks in a row before filing his complaint. In it, he makes …

Fight fire with fire, I suppose. We wrote a post about this action a few months ago, when we first heard that Messy Mya’s estate was suing Beyoncé for twenty million dollars over a little blurb she may or may not have used without permission to kick off her track “Formation.”This video, which has 3 …

Back in July 2016, Musicologize published a pretty deep take down of the “Amazing” versus “Photograph” case, Amazing v. Photograph | Why Sheeran’s Photograph Infringes. and came to the conclusion that Ed Sheeran would be well advised to settle it. And it appears today that he has. Congratulations to “Amazing’s” songwriters, plaintiffs Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard …

Tons of casual observers with youtube channels are getting stroked today as Kandi Burruss & Tiny Harris who wrote TLC’s Billboard topping hit “No Scrubs” are getting a song writing credit on Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You.” But don’t read too much into it. Sure, there has been tons of internet chatter about how Sheeran …

Explicit language and parental advisories on this one. Beyonce is being sued in federal court in New Orleans because the estate of late YouTube notable Messy Mya claims her track “Formation” from the “Lemonade” album use the New Orleans bounce rapper’s voice without their consent. And indeed, in”Formation” the voice of Messy Mya, whose legal name …

UPDATE: It took a while but a song theft lawsuit over “Say You Won’t Let Go” was evidently filed today (May 21, 2018) and look out,  it’s Richard Busch for the plaintiffs. I’m going to take a close look at this one right away and give you the prediction. X Factor comeback kid James Arthur could …