A federal jury of six people found Katy Perry guilty of copying a Christian rap song to create 2013’s “Dark Horse,” one of the biggest hits of her career. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday, July 30, that Perry, co-writer Sarah Hudson, Capitol Records, and producers Dr. Luke, Max Martin, and Cirkut have been found liable for copyright infringement due to the single’s similarities to another song — a claim that may stand in court, but falls apart where music theorists are concerned.
A jury said Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” copied another song. The $2.8 million verdict is alarming.
Perry and collaborators now face the penalty phase of the trial to determine how much they owe.
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Alex Abad-Santos is a senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014. Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.
The jury found Perry and her collaborators guilty of copying a 2009 Christian rap song called “Joyful Noise” by an artist named Marcus Gray, a.k.a. Flame. Gray wrote the song with two other writers, Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu, and they accused Perry of taking their song’s hook.
It doesn’t take a copyright expert or musicologist to recognize that, as Gray suggested, the beginning and beats of “Joyful Noise” sound very similar to 2013’s “Dark Horse.”
And those similar sounds are what Gray and his co-writers’ attorneys took Perry and her collaborators to court over, filing a lawsuit against the pop star in 2014. The case finally went to trial in Los Angeles at the end of July, and the trial lasted seven days. (It’s rare for a case like Perry’s to go before a jury, according to the New York Times.)
But Charlie Harding of the Vox podcast Switched on Pop explains that the striking similarities should be free to use by both artists, despite their similarities. Both “Joyful Noise” and “Dark Horse” use derivative descending minor scales in a basic rhythm, Harding said, and both use staccato downbeat rhythms on a high voiced synthesizer which is common in many trap beats.
Harding also says the songs are in different keys and BPMs (beats per minute), and that the melodies are not the same notes.
Harding created this graphic to point out the differences between the songs:
More importantly, “[no] one should be able to own these core building blocks for the good of all past, present and future art,” Harding said, referring to what he considers to be the fundamental aspects of pop music that both songs share.
You could make the argument that these two songs also sound very similar to an older single: the 1983 song “Moments in Love” by Art of Noise. The site Musicologize made a great point (prior to the verdict) about the similarity of both those songs to“Moments,” and why Perry’s loss in copyright court may become a troubling precedent as a result.
Perry’s lawyer made a similar argument about the universality of the infringement in her closing arguments. “They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera said during closing arguments, according to the AP.
The eyes of the law see it quite differently, unfortunately for Lepera and the musicians indicted in the case. On Thursday, August 1, the jury decided that Perry must pay Gray, Lambert, and Ojukwu $2.78 million in damages, with Perry responsible for $500,000 of that load. It’s an expensive penalty for the pop star — one she surely can pay. But the mark the verdict leaves on the music industry going forward could be just as great.
