Chris Brown and Drake hit back over No Guidance song-theft claim
completemusicupdate.comChris Brown and Drake have hit back at a song-theft claim which, they say, is “baseless”.Not only is there no credible explanation for how the two stars would have accessed the “obscure” song they are accused of ripping off on their 2019 hit ‘No Guidance’, there is no plausible case for suggesting their track infringes the earlier work.
After all, the main similarity is the lyric “you got it”. Which Roy Orbison surely got to first.Singer Braindon Cooper and producer Timothy Valentine sued Brown and Drake last year, claiming that ‘No Guidance’ rips off their 2016 track ‘I Love Your Dress’.
In their lawsuit, Cooper and Valentine said that “in addition to containing similar beat patterns, the melody and lyrics used in the chorus/hook of ‘No Guidance’ – ‘you got it, girl; you got it’ – are so strikingly similar to those used in the chorus of ‘I Love Your Dress’ that they cannot be purely coincidental”.As for how Brown and Drake had heard ‘I Love Your Dress’, Cooper and Valentine argued that they had sent a link to the album on which their track appears to an A&R representative associated with Drake’s then label Cash Money Records, who had approached Cooper to see if he had any new music he could share.But all of that is a whole load of nonsense, reckon Brown and Drake in their formal response.
The two songs may share a key lyric and a more general lyrical theme. But the short and common phrase “you got it” cannot be protected by copyright in isolation.
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