Katy Perry Wins Dark Horse Copyright Lawsuit

Katy Perry (Photo: IG @katyperry)

JAKARTA - Musician Katy Perry won an appeal in a lawsuit against the copyright of the song Dark Horse. Citing a report from Variety, Friday, March 11, Kristen Marcus Gray, whose stage name is Flame, first sued Katy in 2014. He claims Katy's hit Dark Horse is substantially similar to her song Joyful Noise.

In 2019, a Los Angeles Federal Court of Appeals jury found Perry liable for misconduct. However, the ruling was overturned a year later when a judge ruled that the eight ostinato notes Perry allegedly copied lacked the quantum of originality to guarantee copyright protection.

Quoted from ANTARA, Gray appealed the decision in October 2020 and wrote briefly about the aggravating timbre similarities between the songs, and opposed music experts' use of a melody database to determine examples of similarities in previous works.

On March 10, 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury's initial ruling which was overturned by the District Court.

Perry's 2020 win marked the rare occasion a court was willing to overturn a jury ruling in a music copyright case. That same year, Led Zeppelin defeated plaintiff Michael Skidmore over a factually similar lawsuit over "Stairway to Heaven."

Since the Blurred Lines case in which a court ruled that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had infringed on Marvin Gaye's Got to Give It Up copyright with their 2013 hit Blurred Lines, music artists have grown increasingly wary about taking copyright disputes before a jury. So musicians often choose to settle out of court.