Donald Glover attends The 2024 Met Gala Celebrating"Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 06, 2024 in New York City., which claimed that Glover’s 2018 song was “practically identical” to a 2016 track called “Made In America” by a rapper namedThe earlier ruling said Glover had done nothing wrong because the two songs were “entirely different.
Released in 2018, “This Is America” spent two weeks atop the Hot 100 and eventually won record of the year and song of the year at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. It was accompanied by a critically acclaimed music video, directed byNwosuocha sued in May 2021, claiming there were “unmissable” similarities between the song and his own “Made In America,” including the “flow” — the cadence, rhyming schemes, rhythm and other characteristics of hip hop lyrics.
Nwosuocha appealed that ruling, seeking to revive his lawsuit against Glover. But in rejecting that appeal on Friday, the Second Circuit ruled that it didn’t even need to decide whether the songs were similar. Instead, it said the case also failed because Nwosuocha had secured a federal copyright registration only for the recording of the song, not for the underlying composition that he claimed Glover had copied.
“The distinction between a sound recording and a musical work is not just an administrative classification,” the judge wrote. “That statutory distinction is important because sound recordings and musical works are different artistic works that can be copyrighted by different creators and are infringed in different ways.”
Barring an unlikely trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, Friday’s ruling will permanently end Nwosuocha’s lawsuit against Glover. Neither side immediately returned a request for comment on Tuesday.