A Christian rapper who won a nearly US$3mil judgement over Perry's hit 'Dark Horse' used his song's millions of plays on YouTube and Spotify as evidence that Perry and her team may have heard it and then stole it. The Perry trial that ended Aug 1, 2019, with a win for rapper Marcus Gray showed that streaming services and other technology may be proving challenging for copyright law. — AP
LOS ANGELES: To show that Katy Perry and the team that wrote her 2013 hit Dark Horse may have heard his song and stole from it, Christian rapper Marcus Gray’s primary evidence was that his 2009 song, Joyful Noise had plays in the millions on YouTube and Spotify.
Plaintiffs in copyright cases like Gray, who won a US$2.78mil (RM11.62mil) victory over Perry and her co-writers on Aug 1, must prove that the artiste who stole from them had a reasonable opportunity to hear a song that was widely disseminated, a principle lawyers simply refer to as “access”.
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