Batiste v. Najm

Comment by Charles Cronin

Most likely the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Louisiana does not entertain a great many copyright infringement disputes. Perhaps that’s why Judge Engelhardt, goes on a tear in his opinion for this case, exhaustively (and exhaustingly) setting forth and comparing the various – and slightly and subtly different — approaches to determining infringement, which have been established by several federal circuits.

His thirty-two-page opinion also organizes and charts the plaintiff’s claims — involving dozens of musical works and dozens of defendants – to make sense of this jumble of allegations based on nothing more than unsupported and repetitive statements about the “striking similarity” found in defendants’ works to lyrics, melody, chords, etc. used by the plaintiff.

Query why Judge Engelhardt exempted infringement allegations involving three of the plaintiff’s works from the defendants’ Motion to Dismiss, which he otherwise granted. One can hear two of these works, and the corresponding purportedly infringing works, in the clips above. Surely, applying any circuit’s approach to determining infringement, Judge Engelhardt could have confidently discarded claims relating to these works as well.

With this decision the case appears to have petered out. Perhaps the defendants gave the plaintiff something to go away based upon the three exempted works, tho’ likely not quite the $100 million plaintiff sought… Several years later Paul Batiste resumed his litigious mischief, targeting Ryan Lewis and Ben Haggerty (“Macklemore”) but found the Eastern District of Louisiana decidedly less accommodating of him than it was in this earlier dispute.

***

Complaint: PDF

District Court Opinion by Judge Engelhardt: PDF