News
Practice Areas
How to fail at a sound recording copyright infringement
Different types of copyrights convey different kinds and amounts of rights to the holder. One recent infringement case highlighted the distinction between a sound recording copyright and a musical composition copyright — and how a sound recording copyright holder can show infringement.
Hip hop battle launches
In 2012, Eddie Richardson uploaded a hip-hop beat he created to a music-sharing website widely used by music producers and artists. Months later, he recognized the beat in a French Montana song that became a chart-topping hit. (Montana’s real name is Karim Kharbouch.) The next day, he registered a sound recording copyright on the beat. Importantly, he didn’t register a musical composition copyright for it.
Richardson sued Kharbouch in 2019 for copyright infringement. A federal district court ruled for Kharbouch before trial, and Richardson appealed.
Plaintiff gets beat
The appeal was the first time the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit considered the types of evidence necessary to establish a claim for infringement of a sound recording copyright. As the court noted, infringement claimants must present evidence of copying that’s appropriate for the type of copyright at issue.
The court went on to contrast musical composition copyrights with sound recording copyrights. The former, it said, grant “rather expansive rights,” including the exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute and publicly perform the work. The latter protect only those sounds that “directly or indirectly recapture the actual sounds fixed in the recording” from copying.
With that in mind, the appellate court held that a sound recording copyright holder must submit evidence that the alleged infringer duplicated the specific digital sounds used in the copyrighted material. Evidence that the works include the same generic sounds may suffice to show infringement of a musical composition copyright — even without specific facts about those sounds. But that’s not enough for a sound recording copyright. As long as there was no actual copying of the work, a band could play and record its own version in a way that sounded very similar to the work without infringing.
To the naked ear, the court said, Richardson’s beat seemed indistinguishable from the beat in Montana’s song. But Richardson failed to present any evidence that Montana copied his beat. He didn’t conduct depositions to gather evidence of duplication or provide expert testimony suggesting sampling occurred. He also didn’t present indirect evidence of copying by showing Montana had access and opportunity to duplicate the beat. Nor did he provide substantial similarity evidence that supported an inference of sampling.
One more note
It’s worth noting that the Seventh Circuit didn’t address whether any amount of digital sampling would be sufficient to establish an infringement claim. It declined to consider the issue because Richardson had presented no evidence of digital sampling.
© 2026
