How Did Notorious B.I.G., Wu-Tang Clan, and Kanye West Help Future Avoid a Lawsuit?

Back in 2021, relatively unknown Virginia artist DaQuan Robinson filed a lawsuit against Atlanta trap-rap star Future, claiming the rapper’s 2018 song “When I Think About It” illegally infringed on the copyright for his own song “When U Think About It.” According to the suit, Robinson had sent “When U Think About It” to one of Future’s producers beforehand, and believed Future took inspiration from the song without crediting him a year later.

However, on Friday (August 25), Illinois judge Martha Pacold disagreed with Robinson’s accusation, ruling in favor of Future. Essentially stating that the ideas Robinson believed were stolen, were instead just common tropes within hip-hop music. Pacold declared that “none of the elements Robinson has identified in ‘When U Think About It’ is protectable,” according to Billboard.

“The thematic elements that [the accusers] address—guns, money, and jewelry—are frequently present in hip-hop and rap music,” Pacold said per court documents. “The commonality of these themes in hip-hop and rap place [them] outside the protections of copyright law.”

Additionally, to further validate her claims, Pacold pointed to iconic songs like The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Machine Gun Funk,” Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me),” and Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” all of which contain similar subject matter.

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Also in the suit, though, Robinson insisted that Future’s when I think about it lyric was too similar to his own when you think about it. On top of this, he asserted that both his song and Future’s song tell tales about triumphing over adversity. Pacold still felt there was not a strong enough connection to rule in favor of Robinson.

“A story about a person proving to those around him that he is better, despite a past full of hardships is general enough that it could also describe the plot of famous works of American literature,” Pacold said. “The core lyric, ‘our house is a very, very, very fine house,’ is used to support the entire rest of the song, which uses the house and its constituent elements as the setting for the narrator’s relationship… The mere use of a ‘core lyric’ to support a song’s storyline is not a protectable element because it is a frequently utilized technique in popular songwriting.”

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