Katy Perry has been ordered to pay a Christian rapper $550,000 (£454,000) of her earnings from her 2013 song “Dark Horse”.
The amount is part of the $2.7 million (£2.2 million) her co-writers and record label Capitol are paying to Marcus Gray, aka Flame.
Flame’s lawyers allege Katy and her team copied “an important part” of his 2009 song “Joyful Noise” in legal proceedings that began in 2014.
On Monday, jurors found all six writers of “Dark Horse” guilty of copyright infringement, though only a section of the instrumental track was in dispute.
They all testified that they had never heard of Gray or his song before the case was brought to court.
As the rhythmic instrumental riff from “Joyful Noise” plays through 45% of “Dark Horse”, Mr Kahn said his clients were entitled to 45% of the entire earnings of Perry’s album Prism, where the song appears.
The defence argued for an award of almost £300,000 and recommended dividing the money by the number of songs on the album.
However, lawyer Aaron M Wais argued that based on expert testimony, the disputed part of “Dark Horse” was only worth 5% of its earnings and that Perry was the biggest driver of them, as she was already a major star when the song was recorded.
He said: “The reason why people buy a Katy Perry album, buy a Katy Perry song, is because it’s Katy Perry. If you replaced her with an anonymous artist, do you really think it would sell as well?”
Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera said the team planned to vigorously fight the decision, as the writers of “Dark Horse” considered it as a “travesty of justice”.
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