Drake and Chris Brown’s familiar track is titled “No Guidance,” but I admit I think of it a little bit as “You Got It,” and it occurs to me that this isn’t even my first time looking at this track. “No Guidance” faced another separate infringement claim in 2022. Musicologize looked and found no merit. Indeed it was eventually dropped. And we don’t expect to spend more than 30 minutes on this one either. But we’ll see.
More than a little unusual this complaint includes a defamation of character claim. Something about a YouTube takedown and whether it was reasonable, I think?? You’ll need to read about that elsewhere. The complaint, perhaps. I’m not a lawyer. I’ll stay in my lane, or stick to my knitting, or something like that.
Here’s “No Guidance” and “I Got It” by plaintiffs Tykeiya Dore and Mark Stephens.
As is so often the case, it’s hard to miss. But there are lots of considerations.
First, infringement requires copying, and copying requires access. The plaintiffs’ ideas around access are laid out in the complaint. The courts look for something more than mere plausibility. Sometimes the only way to determine if access is probable is to evaluate the similarity. In addition to copying, infringement of course requires substantial similarity of elements that are original to and protectable by the plaintiff. And there’s what I sometimes call “lookback logic” since a compelling amount of similarity helps look back and substantiate an inference of access. As a forensic musicologist, I might find myself arguing that the musical similarities are such that access can be reasonably assumed because of the amount and nature of the similarities. Here, no.
Obviously, we hear two songs that say “you got it” and “I got it” a lot. But short lyrical phrases are rarely protectable by copyright unless they’re quite distinctive. Off the top of my head, who else sang,”You got it?” Roy Orbison sang “You Got It” back in 1989. It was a huge hit. It went, “Anything you want, you got it,” and the three notes to which Orbison sang the three words, in “doe a deer a female dear” terms, were “Mi, Re, Do.” (Remember that for later.) Cheap Trick repeatedly sang “You Got It” back in 1982, as in “If you want my love, you got it. (Do La Do, this first time time, if you’re wondering) and “When You Need My Love, You Got It” (Mi Mi Do this second time.)
And it’s of little consequence but those aren’t really the same meaning as here. So then my quick internet search led me to Charli XCX singing “I Got It” over and over and over again in 2017, and her meaning is far more similar — she has confidence and it’s justified. Then I guess there’s Ryan Innes, famously from The Voice, with an “I Got It” on his second album “What I’m Looking For.” And Apple Music, I’ve just found, will play a long list of “I Got It” songs.
Short lyrical phrases that are very common are especially unprotectable, and these aren’t even the same. “If I got it, tell me I got it,” is not the same as “You got it, girl, you got it.” And before it even crosses your mind, concepts themselves aren’t protectable by copyright. We’re looking for similar original and protectable expression, not the idea of having it or not having it.
The complaint says there’s much more to this, claiming “No Guidance” uses “the same chord progressions, tempo, pitch, key, melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, phrasing, and lyrics,” as “I Got It“. Some of these though, first of all, aren’t very musicologically significant. Tempo and key are unimportant enough that in most cases the first thing I do in an A/B analysis is transpose the songs to a common key and maybe a common tempo. Among other things, it makes comparisons easier, especially when I try to convey it to others, as I will to you in a minute with some notation. At any rate, it wouldn’t especially matter if the complaint was correct about the keys being the same, but it just so happens that I did transpose these as a first step because they’re not.
Now for something significant, the harmony and chord progressions; not the same. Essentially, after I transpose them to a common key, they’re these respective chord progressions…
"No Guidance" ||: Ebmaj7 | Gm | Ebmaj7 | Gm :||
"I Got It" ||: Gm Bb | Eb | Gm Bb | Eb :||
And as for the melodies, which might be paramount, again, essentially, here they are.
First, yes, we can attribute some of the observable similarity here to the fact that these phrases are based largely on the same three notes. But then, it’s just three notes; and three notes that are in scale order; “Mi. Re. and Do.” (Don’t anyone come at me with any minor solfege. we could quibble, but let’s not, because it doesn’t matter.) The point is that copyright doesn’t like to protect three notes, and especially not scales.
Moreover, these two melodies are quite different, especially when combined with their different respective harmonic contexts.
I sketched it out quickly. We could quibble here too, but it wouldn’t change anything. Also, it doesn’t much matter if you can read music, nor does it even matter which line, top or bottom, is which of these two songs. Simply ask yourself, scanning from left to right, how many times do you see the same melody note occurring at the same point in time?
Pitches are vertical. Points in time are horizontal. Did you find more than one instance of the same pitch at the same point in time? Me neither.
(The bottom one is “No Guidance.” “You got it, girl, you got it. You got it, girl, you uu uu uu.”)
Let’s recap.
The three-word phrase itself “I Got It,” is too brief and too common to be protectable, and only 2/3 the same as “You Got It.” These three not identical words are also NOT sung to the same three notes, in fact the entire melodies are very different.
Yes, of course, we hear the similarities! And I nearly always empathize with plaintiffs who in my experience nearly always sincerely believe they’ve been wronged.
But the similarities we all hear across these two works are not nearly “significant” or ‘striking” from an extrinsic perspective. I’d expect this to go away fairly quickly.
