Drake dismissed from song-theft lawsuit over his Chris Brown collab

completemusicupdate.com:

The songwriters who have accused Chris Brown and Drake of ripping off one of their tracks on the 2019 hit ‘No Guidance’ have dismissed their legal claims against the latter, but not the former.

Though it’s not currently entirely clear why.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, the plaintiffs 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”.Brown and Drake were pretty scathing in their response to that lawsuit, saying in a legal filing in January that Cooper and Valentine’s litigation was entirely premised upon “the alleged similarity between the wholly generic lyrical phrase ‘you got it’ and the alleged similar (and unoriginal) theme of a hard-working, attractive woman”.They added: “No one, including plaintiffs, can own or monopolise the non-copyrightable phrase ‘you got it’, and it should come as no surprise that this phrase appears in countless other works.

Also, lyrical themes are simply unprotectable as a matter of law”.Cooper and Valentine then hit back at those claims, arguing that Brown and Drake had ignored their expert musicologist’s conclusion that “the two works share a ‘high degree of combined similar features’”.