Breaking: Beyonce Sued For Stealing Lemonade

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Sorry Beyonce, but that Lemonade trailer was my idea…

Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade, has apparently been lifted from a movie made a year before Lemonade even hit the music scene.  Matthew Fulks is the filmmaker who now claims that Beyonce stole clips from his short film titled Palinoia.  Fulks says that Beyonce’s trailer bears too many similarities for it to be a coincidence.

Both videos have key elements, such as graffiti on the walls, black and white eyes, a grass scene, a parking garage, and several other key shots. Fulk says he came up with all of those elements first.  ”The number of aesthetic decisions included in Plaintiff’s PALINOIA Work that are parroted in Defendants’ LEMONADE Trailer demonstrates that the LEMONADE Trailer is substantially similar to the PALINOIA Work,” the legal complaint reads.

But what if Beyonce — or anyone on her production team — never saw the video they allegedly copied?  Fulks says that people in Beyonce’s team had access to the visuals of his short film, as he not only wrote and directed an advertisement for WDRB radio, but was also asked to direct a video for a Columbian artist by the name MS MR.

This isn’t the first time that the singer has been under fire for allegedly copying someone else’s work.  The visuals on the song ‘Hold Up’ from the album was also said to be lifted from an earlier video by Swiss artist Pipiloti dating back to 1997. In the ‘Hold Up’ video Beyonce is seen walking in a yellow floaty dress holding some sort of bat and then smashes a car window, which is almost identical to a shot in Pipiloti’s video.

Here are both clips below…

(Image by Asterio Tecson, Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic, cc by-sa 2.0)