A live performance from Snoop Dogg, who’s facing an infringement action over two BODR tracks. Photo Credit: gcardinal
Another day, another copyright battle: Snoop Dogg has been slapped with an infringement complaint for allegedly infringing on two tracks incorporated into BODR.
Producer-songwriter Trevor Lawrence Jr. just recently submitted that complaint to a California federal court, with Snoop Dogg himself, Death Row Records, and Web3 platform Gala Music named as defendants.
As described by the direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement suit, the plaintiff in 2010 created and copyrighted two backing tracks, “Pop Pop Pop Goes My 9” and “Get This D with Hook.”
Fast forward a decade to November of 2020, when the Ed Sheeran and Alicia Keys collaborator Lawrence Jr. claims to have presented the works to Snoop Dogg “for potential in-studio experimentation.”
The way the filing party tells the story, Snoop “responded positively” and requested copies, which were provided without “any agreement” in place regarding the efforts’ commercial exploitation.
Then, late January of 2022 allegedly saw a representative of Snoop Dogg and his Death Row Records label reach out to Lawrence Jr. to explain that the famed rapper and entrepreneur “intended to include a derivative work based upon ‘Pop Pop Pop Goes My 9’ in an upcoming album.”
During that conversation, Lawrence Jr. explained that he’d require as a fee a $10,000 producer advance (to be recouped against the appropriate royalty stream), the retention of a 50 percent stake in the underlying composition, and publishing royalties from the derivative creation, per the legal text.
The terms, Lawrence Jr. purportedly made clear during the call, would need to be put into writing; the representative is said to have confirmed that the described details were suitable. And when he received a similar call the following day about Snoop’s desire to use “Get This D with Hook,” the plaintiff essentially communicated the same general terms, according to the suit.
Though it’s not exactly spelled out in the lawsuit itself, Lawrence Jr. does, in fact, have producer credits on the resulting BODR works: “Pop Pop” and “Get This Dick,” with the latter including a songwriter credit to boot.
Nevertheless, Lawrence Jr. claims he wasn’t “furnished with any paperwork to confirm the agreed-upon scope of use or terms of compensation for exploitation” of his works. That’s proving a big hang-up in light of the “stash boxes” that Snoop Dogg and Death Row released via Gala towards the top of 2022.
Unsurprisingly, given Snoop’s longtime support for Web3 and the nature of Gala’s model, the stash boxes included NFTs (and in particular 1,470 tokens per track, we covered nearly two years ago). But Lawrence Jr. didn’t “authorize any such exploitation of his work, which was never within his prior contemplation.” All told, the plaintiff estimates that the defendants pulled in “tens of millions of dollars” via the so-called stash boxes.
While the majority of the complaint gives the distinct impression that Lawrence Jr.’s seeking damages specifically for the stash boxes and other allegedly unapproved exploitations, the main body’s final paragraph makes it seem like the plaintiff hasn’t received any royalties at all.
“To date,” that paragraph reads, “Defendants have refused to properly license the Lawrence Tracks or compensate Lawrence for their use in the Broadus Tracks. This refusal encompasses not only the Stash Boxes, but all traditional forms of phonorecord exploitation (for which Lawrence has received no royalties from Defendants).”
In any event, Lawrence Jr. is seeking injunctions blocking the alleged infringement, damages, and the profits resulting from the BODR tracks in question. DMN reached out to Gala for comment but didn’t receive a response in time for publishing.
