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Beyonce hits back at new song theft claims
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 16 June 2015
Legal reps for Beyonce have requested that new claims of song theft made against their client be thrown out of court on the basis the allegations are both “vague and cryptic” – never a good start in a legal claim – and also utterly without merit.
The singer – “an enormously successful entertainer, songwriter, recording artist, actress, music producer, winning seventeen Grammy Awards and selling more than 118 million albums as a solo artist and a further 60 million albums with the recording group Destiny’s Child”, note her lawyers in their response – is accused of ripping off a song called ‘XOXO’ for her 2013 track ‘XO’.
According to Radar Online, plaintiff Ahmad Lane claims to have sent a digital copy of his track, ‘XOXO’, to one of Beyonce’s backing singers, Crissy Collins. Although somewhat lite on actual details, the lawsuit implies that the backing singer then shared Lane’s record with the popstar, who presumably took it straight to Ryan Tedder and Terius Nash and whispered “let’s Pharrell the shit out of this”.
But, say Beyonce’s legal reps, not only is there no evidence that happened, there is also very little to connect the two tracks beyond a similar name. Lane’s lawsuit claims two moments of musical similarity, one early on and one towards the end of the Beyonce song, while also claiming that the artwork attached to her record was similar to that which he attached to ‘XOXO’.
But the popstar’s lawyers say there are “simply no protectable – or even audible similarities” between the two records, adding: “The two works at issue are entirely different songs that share no lyrical or musical similarity, other than perhaps the letters ‘X’ and ‘O'”.
