Songwriters hit back at Chris Brown and Drake’s “haughty claims” in song-theft dispute

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 hit back in a new legal filing.

An attempt by Brown and Drake to get the lawsuit that was filed in relation to the alleged song-theft dismissed was high on arrogance and low on legal arguments, said songwriters reckon.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”.As for how Brown and Drake had heard ‘I Love Your Dress’, Cooper and Valentine pointed out 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.In a legal filing last month calling for the lawsuit to be dismissed, Brown and Drake’s legal rep argued that the litigation was “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.

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.