Photo Credit: Bill Oxford
A Florida man is suing Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music for allegedly infringing upon his music in Lil Baby’s recently released My Turn and Future and Drake’s “Life is Good,” respectively.
Digital Music News obtained an exclusive copy of the corresponding legal filing, which one Jesse Harris submitted to a federal court.
According to Harris’ complaint, Lil Baby’s My Turn album, which was released on February 28th as part of a UMG deal, infringes upon music that he published on his personal Facebook page, under the temporary name of Larry Harris. (A deluxe edition of My Turn, featuring six additional songs, dropped on May 1st.)
Per the text of Harris’ suit against UMG, the Big Three label (and presumably Lil Baby) “accessed and used the content I created on my Facebook.com profile without my permission” both in crafting My Turn and in making its corresponding music videos. Harris goes on to allege, specifically, that UMG used his stories “to create the lyrics and plot of the songs and the music videos.”
For this alleged copyright infringement, the Florida man is seeking $3 million in damages.
Harris makes similar allegations on the Sony Music side of the complaint, though he indicates that the alleged copyright infringement occurred in Future and Drake’s “Life is Good,” and that some portion of the work was also pulled from his personal Facebook profile.
And for this alleged unauthorized use, Harris is seeking an additional $3 million in damages.
Interestingly, however, Harris takes the latter copyright-infringement allegation a step further by claiming “that they [Sony Music/Future/Drake] used a picture of myself that I posted to create the title [of the track].” Expanding on the latter, Harris emphasizes that one of his photos showed him wearing a shirt reading “Life is Good.”
The final leg of Harris’s filing seeks a staggering $50 million from Lionsgate Entertainment, this time for allegedly stealing plot points from his personal Facebook profile. The allegedly stolen intellectual property was used to forge the story of 2019’s Bombshell, according to the legal document.
At the time of this writing, none of the three defendants (or the involved artists) had publicly responded to Harris’s suit.
More as this develops.