This is The Legal Beat, a weekly music law newsletter from Billboard Progiving you a single cheat sheet of big new cases, major decisions and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: The 2 Live Crew wins a trial to regain control of their music catalog. Young Thug's lawyer wins a ruling that overturns his criminal contempt conviction. Didi faces more and more accusations of sexual abuse. and many more.
THE BIG STORY: Termination Determination
2 Live Crew has won a rare court battle over the Copyright Act's “right to terminate” — a critical federal provision that allows songwriters and artists to take back the rights to their music decades after selling it to a label.
The termination was at the center of recent lawsuits involving Cher, Brian Wilson and Dwight Yoakam, and both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have faced class-action lawsuits from artists pushing to get their music back en masse. Jay-Z recently invoked the termination to win back his debut album, and it was also the key issue behind a “landmark” new copyright rule issued earlier this year about who gets paid streaming royalties.
The 2 Live controversy began in 2020 when Uncle Luke (Luther Campbell) and the heirs of two of his bandmates filed a complaint against Lil Joe Records, which bought the band's catalog out of bankruptcy in the 1990s. The label responded by suing the band in federal court, arguing that the termination did not apply to the five albums at issue in the case.
Such disputes rarely reach a jury. But in a lawsuit earlier this month, Lil Joe's lawyers argued that bankruptcy protection trumped any termination rights the members had. 2 Live's lawyers told a different story – one of “fraud and dishonesty” by Lil Joe's owner that “wouldn't be out of place in a Netflix movie”.
In their verdict, the jury sided with 2 Live, allowing them to recover much of their catalog. Read our full story here to learn more.
Other top stories this week…
THE AREA WAS CLEARED – The Georgia Supreme Court agreed Brian Steelea lawyer who served as Young Thug's lead counsel in the rapper's never-ending gang trial in Atlanta and overturned a ruling earlier this year that had held him in contempt of court. The decision will close a strange chapter in which the judge Ural Glanville sentenced Steel to 20 days in jail for refusing to reveal how he learned about a secret meeting between a judge and prosecutor – an incident that later led to Glanville being removed from the case. But it will not end the trial, which is already the largest in the history of the state of Georgia and has no end.
THE PHOTO STRIKES AGAIN – The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has been sued over allegations that the museum illegally displayed a copyrighted image of Van Halen taken by veteran rock photographer Neil Zlozower. If that name sounds familiar, it should: Zlozower has filed more than fifty such lawsuits over the past decade, including cases against Universal Music Group, Spotify, Ticketmaster, Mötley Crüe, and many others.
GOING HOME – Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory – a convicted drug dealer and money launderer involved in the early careers of rappers Jeezy and TI – has been released from prison and will serve the rest of his decades-long sentence in a halfway house. The rise and fall of Meech's gang is chronicled in 50 Cent's Starz series BMFin which Flenory's son plays his father.
EVER MORE DIDDY – Since the last time you heard Legal Beat A week ago, there were three major developments in the story of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is currently accused of decades of sexual abuse:
- Combs was hit with another wave of six civil lawsuits, including several for assaults through 2022 and one alleging he assaulted a 13-year-old girl. The cases were the latest by two lawyers who had already filed six such lawsuits and warned earlier this month that they are representing at least 120 more alleged victims.
- The new cases prompted Combs' attorney to ask the judge overseeing his criminal case to issue a gag order barring the alleged victims and their attorneys from issuing “out-of-court statements” about Combs to the press, arguing that such statements threaten his right to a fair trial.
- Separately in the criminal case, Combs' team sought a court order that would compel the government to reveal the names of alleged sexual abuse victims, arguing that he cannot fairly defend himself without knowing their identities: “The government is forcing him, unfairly , to play a guessing game'.
SION RAPP WAS ARRESTED – T.I.'s 20-year-old son, Clifford “King” Harris Jr. was arrested in Georgia on an open warrant stemming from 2022 charges of speeding, driving with a suspended license and DUI. The incident was sparked when King nearly hit a police car as he was leaving a gas station. officers reported smelling marijuana when they approached his car and that he was found with a gun on his hip.
