No Joyful Noise over Katy’s court debacle

Katy Perry and her ‘Dark Horse’ collaborators are appealing the verdict that ruled that they were liable for copying the underlying beat of Marcus Gray’s (aka Flame) 2008 Christian rap song, ‘Joyful Noise’. Katy Perry and her team filed the appeal, requesting the California court to overturn the case and grant them a new trial. They described the original judgement as “a grave miscarriage of justice”.

“The erroneous verdicts in this case and the precedent established thereby presents serious harm to music creators and to the music industry as a whole,” Perry’s statement reads.
The singer and her collaborators also argued that Gray’s song was not famous enough for them to have heard it and copied it: “No reasonable factfinder could have concluded that ‘Joyful Noise’ was so well-known that it could be reasonably inferred that Defendants heard it, particularly in this digital age of content overload, with billions of videos and songs available to users with trillions of streams”.