1994’s Ready to Die was and still is ranked amongst the top 50 albums in Hip-Hop to date. As the first release of the late great Notorious B.I.G., it not only put our favorite beat-thief, Sean “Diddy” Combs, on the map, it single-handedly launched the Bad Boy empire. Unfortunately, this must-have may soon be hard to come by – a jury decided this past Friday (March 17) the title track contains an uncleared portion of an Ohio Players song.
Jurors sided with Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, owners of the rights to the 1971 tune Singing In the Morning, finding Bad Boy Entertainment and its executive producer Diddy guilty of copyright infringement (i.e. sampling without clearance.) The music publishing company has been awarded $4.2 million in punitive and direct damages.
As the latest in hundreds of sampling lawsuits brought on by Bridgeport Music and its sister company Westbound Records, who also own royalties for songs by George Clintonand the Funkadelics, this further drives home the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals stance that “…even when a small part of a sound recording is sampled, the part taken is something of value.”
“We’ve just been battling this for such a long time,” Armen Boladian, owner of Westbound and Bridgeport said. “So many have been settled because companies didn’t want anything to do with it, and we knew we were right.”
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There is no word yet on when and how the ban on Ready to Die will be sanctioned. The defendants, Bad Boy Entertainment, Bad Boy LLC, Justin Combs Publishing and Universal Records, are planning to appeal the decision stating “[the verdict] is without merit,” defense lawyer Jay Bowen remarked.
Reported by: N. Corren Conway
