Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion have gained a victory after a court ruling threw out a lawsuit that accused the female rappers of stealing the lyrics to their hit song “Wap.”
According to Billboard, In a decision issued Tuesday (Aug. 29), a Manhattan federal judge ruled that the lyrics Cardi and Megan were accused of copying in their songs were simply too unoriginal to be covered by copyright law. “The lyrics over which plaintiff asserts copyright protection are no more than common phrases, employed frequently in popular culture and other Hip-Hop songs,” U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter wrote. “The concept of using ‘p—- so wet’ as a rhetorical device in a song is neither original nor unique to plaintiff,” the judge wrote. “Likewise, defendants have provided examples of at least three songs pre-dating [‘Grab Em’] which use some variation of the phrase ‘n—–s wild’n.’”
As we previously reported, a lawsuit was filed last year by a rapper named Denise Jones who goes by the name Nacey X. The woman previously claimed that Cardi and Meg “copy and pasted” her lyrics and used them for their song, but according to this new ruling that simple wasn’t the case. Judge Carter said Jones not only lacked valid copyrights in those lyrics but that Cardi and Megan’s own words were not “substantially similar” to her song which is the key requirement for proving copyright infringement.
“Defendants’ lyric, ‘why you in the club with n—-s wild’n,’ poses a question to the rapper (or to the audience), while plaintiff’s lyric refers to the rapper’s effect on a single individual,” the judge wrote. “Thus, the phrase is used in different ways and has different meanings such that an ordinary listener would not identify defendants’ lyric as being appropriated from plaintiff’s song.”
The lawsuit also included allegations that the two famous female rappers stalked Jones, but the judge quickly tossed those allegations away as well. “Plaintiff makes generalized allegations about fearing for her safety from alleged stalking and harassment by the ‘cartel’ that she equates to the music industry at large, but plaintiff neither identifies any negligent conduct on the part of defendants or any special duty to avoid causing emotional distress,” the judge wrote.