<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"      Rick Ross may have to pay out for &amp;quot;3 Kings.&amp;quot; Last week, two gospel songwriters, Clara Shepherd Warrick and Jimmy Lee Weary, filed a lawsuit against the rapper, along with Dr. Dre and Jay-Z, for sampling a gospel song in the Ross single. The suit claims Ross and others failed to clear the necessary rights when sampling the 1976 Crowns of Glory song &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m So Grateful (Keep in Touch),&amp;quot; for which Weary is credited as a writer. The plaintiffs claim no one contacted Weary about the sample or compensated him. (Watch the Rick Ross music video above, and listen to the Crowns Glory track below.)      As you probably already know, the music world is no stranger to such lawsuits. But the &amp;quot;3 Kings&amp;quot; case is a unique one. According to Julie Ahrens, director of Copyright and Fair Use at Stanford University&amp;#039;s Center for Internet and Society, that&amp;#039;s because such bandied-about issues as fair use, parody, and obscenity don&amp;#039;t figure neatly with the suit and the parties involved.  For one, fair use probably can&amp;#039;t defend the unlicensed sampling in &amp;quot;3 Kings.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Fair use covers using a work in a transformative way,&amp;quot; Ahrens says, pointing to its prevailing in other hip-hops cases. &amp;quot;Whether you can just take three notes of a gospel song just because it sounds good \u2014 clearly you cannot do that... That&amp;#039;s copying merely because it sounds good. There&amp;#039;s a clearly-defined licensing market for things like this, particularly in rap music.&amp;quot; Not helping the situation is the popular music video, with almost 3.7 million hits on YouTube as of today, which, according to the lawsuit, &amp;quot;includes very graphic depictions of drug use, vulgarity, nudity, gun violence, criminal conduct, actions demeaning to women, and many other items that are certainly inconsistent with Plaintiffs&amp;#039; wishes for how Plaintiffs&amp;#039; song would be portrayed.&amp;quot; For its perceived bastardization of their original artistic intent, the plaintiffs want &amp;quot;3 Kings&amp;quot; completely wiped off the map, a move Ahrens thinks may be too severe to hold up in court. &amp;quot;Granting an injunction and giving the copyright holder the ability to stop the sale, reproduction, distribution of the song (and yes that could be all forms \u2014 removal of YouTube videos, downloads, CDs in stores, etc.) would be too much power, in my opinion,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a draconian remedy for sampling a portion of another work. In our society we don&amp;#039;t take censorship lightly.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s why obscenity is so difficult to prove, even if Ross, Jay-Z, and Dr. Dre do use lines like &amp;quot;spray these n****s baby just like daddy taught ya&amp;quot; (as the lawsuit quotes) over a gospel piano melody. However unholy you think the juxtaposition may be, monetary compensation is a more realistic outcome for the case, &amp;quot;to make the copyright holder whole, without giving the copyright holder the power to censor works they don&amp;#039;t like.&amp;quot; What may be most interesting about the Ross case, though, is the logic by which the plaintiffs claim the popularity of &amp;quot;3 Kings&amp;quot; has caused its own damage to their original work. Of particular concern to Warrick and Weary were this weekend&amp;#039;s Grammy Awards, where God Forgives, I Don&amp;#039;t, which includes the song, was nominated for Best Rap Album. &amp;quot;It is pretty interesting because they&amp;#039;re claiming they can&amp;#039;t promote it as a gospel song because of this,&amp;quot; Ahrens said. &amp;quot;In an obscenity context, it&amp;#039;s not that the public is harmed by listening to it; it&amp;#039;s their market as a gospel song. That&amp;#039;s a huge issue in fair use: How does that affect the market on the original?&amp;quot; The lawsuit asserts just that, saying the Grammy broadcast automatically opened the plaintiffs&amp;#039; song &amp;quot;worldwide to irreparable harm of being linked to defendant&amp;#039;s song.&amp;quot; Ross lost to Drake at the Grammys. If he loses this legal battle, he may inadvertently set up a new precedent for hip-hop sampling that could change how the industry operates. After all, Ahrens says, &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s part of what hip-hop is: building off of existing works. That&amp;#039;s how the form has developed.&amp;quot; It will depend on the defense, but &amp;quot;3 Kings&amp;quot; could serve as a cautionary tale for artists against similar sample-happy action. &amp;quot;This angle on &amp;#039;you destroyed it for our audience for gospel music, who will always hear it as this other song&amp;#039; \u2014 that strikes me as a somewhat novel approach, and an argument that could go very far.&amp;quot;  Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a17467/rick-ross-3-kings-lawsuit-15092002/?click=news>