A pair of songwriters who sued Drake and Chris Brown last October for copyright infringement over the 2019 collaborative single “No Guidance” have dropped the former from the case.
“It is hereby ordered and adjudged that defendant Aubrey Drake Graham a/k/a Drake is dismissed with prejudice and without costs or attorneys’ fees as against any party,” the court documents read.
The judge overseeing the case couldn’t help but have some fun, writing, “In dismissing this case, the Court notes that Mr. Graham started from the bottom—being named as a defendant—now we’re here—a dismissal with prejudice.”
As of April 27, Brown remains a defendant in the lawsuit.
Back in February, Plaintiff Braindon Cooper claimed the two artists were “both egotistical and without any legal basis whatsoever” to contend that they did not have “plausible” access to his 2016 song “I Love Your Dress,” which Cooper alleges Drake and Breezy ripped off to craft the hook for “No Guidance.”
A month later, Brown’s legal team responded to the accusations in a new filing, writing, “This is not a close call. Posting a song on the Internet—such that the song is 1 out of 82 million songs on Spotify or posted by one of Instagram’s 1 billion users—and a one-time public performance do not constitute widespread dissemination as a matter of law.”
Brown’s lawyer James G. Sammataro went on to reject Cooper’s claim that he sent his song to Canadian A&R Mic Tee in March 2019, and that the A&R then “suggested” that they meet “in Toronto.”
The March filing also asked for the suit to be dismissed “in its entirety with prejudice.”
“Mr. Graham—a co-author of the musical composition embodied in the sound recording ‘No Guidance’—hereby incorporates and restates all of the arguments raised in the Moving Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss in full, including the requests for relief therein,” the legal docs stated.
The duo previously requested for the lawsuit to be dismissed on the grounds that Cooper’s track is “obscure” and Drake and Brown were unaware of it before writing “No Guidance.”
