Besides being in the news because CBS decided to nix the song from its football telecasts, "Run This Town," the Jay Z and Rihanna track, is also at the center of a copyright infringement case that Hova wants dismissed.
There hasn't been much coverage of the lawsuit, which pits record label TufAmerica against Jay Z, Roc-A-Fella and Atlantic Records because of one syllable. Billboard and TechDirt both report that the record label is claiming Jay Z, also known as Shawn Carter, sampled Eddie Bo's song "Hook & Sling" illegally for the 2009 track that also features Kanye West. According to court documents, TufAmerica contests Jay Z used the "oh" from early in Bo's song throughout "Run This Town." Hova and his crew filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Sept. 9, claiming the allegations don't fall under copyright regulation because the sample is minimal.
"Plaintiff apparently believes that it has a monopoly on the use of the word 'oh' and that it can stop others from using this word in recorded form," the motion states. "Well-established copyright jurisprudence should allow this Court to disabuse Plaintiff of that notion. First, it is black letter law that words and short phrases are simply not protectable under the Copyright Act. Thus, Plaintiff cannot state a claim based on the alleged infringement of a generic lyric such as, "oh," or the sound recording thereof, and Plaintiffs claims should be dismissed as a matter of law."
Jay Z's motion also points out that the record label knows that the word isn't enough to get copyright protection because of a previous case in which TufAmerica sued The Beastie Boys (a day before the passing of Adam Yauch) over using the phrase "Now I want y'all to break this down." The label alleged that the group sampled the line from band Trouble Funk without permission, but the courts dismissed the claims because, as Jay Z's motion states, "such alleged infringements were quantitatively and qualitatively insignificant as a matter of law."
