American singer Katy Perry copied her 2013 song ‘Dark Horse’ from a Christian rap song, a US court has ruled.
According to BBC, Katy gave evidence in the week-long trial, denying she had ever heard the 2009 song ‘Joyful Noise’ by Flame before recording her track.
She even offered to perform Dark Horse for the courtroom when her lawyers were unable to play the song for jurors because of a broken speaker system.
During the trial, Katy’s team described the beat of both songs as “commonplace”, arguing that because of that, Flame could not claim copyright.
“They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” said Katy’s lawyer Christine Lepera during her closing arguments in court last week.
But lawyers representing Flame claimed that Katy and her team had “copied an important part” of his song, at the conclusion of legal proceedings that started in 2014.
He also mentioned the fact that Katy started her career as a Christian artist. Despite the trial focusing on the production of the song it was produced by Dr Luke, Max Martin and Cirkut the court found that the six songwriters of Dark Horse were also liable.
This includes Katy Perry, and rapper Juicy J, who contributed a verse to the song. ‘Dark Horse’ was released in 2013 on Katy’s fourth album ‘Prism’ and is one of her biggest hits.
It has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide and the video for the song was the first-ever by a female artist to reach a billion views on both YouTube and Vevo. In total, the video has been watched more than 2.6 billion times since its release in 2014.’
Today (Tuesday 30th July 2019) the court will start work on deciding how much in damages Flame may be owed.
