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WAP lyric theft lawsuit dismissed

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 1 September 2023

A court in New York has dismissed a lyric theft claim made against Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion because, and let’s be clear about this, standalone lyrics about wet pussies are not sufficiently original to enjoy copyright protection. And that, people, is the law.

“The concept of using ‘pussies so wet’ as a rhetorical device in a song is neither original nor unique to plaintiff”, district judge Andrew L Carter Jr declared in a ruling earlier this week, “and in any event, copyright does not protect ideas or themes”.

You might have guessed that the Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion song subject to this particular lyric theft claim was ‘WAP’. Denise Jones, who performs as Necey X, alleged that the 2020 hit ripped off lyrics she wrote the previous year as part in a song called ‘Grab Em By The Pussy’.

Additional claims were also made that other Megan Thee Stallion tracks – including ‘Thot Shit’ and ‘Don’t Stop’ – lifted lyrics from either ‘Grab Em By The Pussy’ or other songs Jones had written. And there was another rapper named as a defendant alongside Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, that being ‘WAP’ co-writer Pardison Fontaine, aka Jordan Thorpe.

Jones claimed that she had previously been involved in a business venture with Thorpe’s father which ended in a legal dispute. This, she theorised, provided a motive for “defendants to retaliate against her by infringing on her copyrighted works”.

However, the motives of the defendants in the case – and whether or not they had had access to ‘Grab Em By The Pussy’ before writing ‘WAP’ – wasn’t really relevant.

Why? Well, because none of the identified songs were substantially similar to Jones’s work, and while some individual lyrics were similar – as you will all surely remember – “the concept of using ‘pussies so wet’ as a rhetorical device in a song is neither original nor unique to plaintiff”.

And while it wasn’t just lines about wet pussies that the various songs named in Jones’s lawsuit had in common, the other similarities were also too generic for any claim of copyright infringement.

“Plaintiff claims”, Carter added, “that her lyrics ‘from east or west coast all the bosses fuck with me’ were infringed upon by defendants’ [’Don’t Stop’] lyrics ‘real niggas love me from the H to the D’”.

“While these lyrics might use a similar rhetorical device to demonstrate their respective rapper’s wide geographical appeal, they are in fact different sentences which communicate similar, yet clearly distinct messages”.

And with all that in mind, Carter dismissed Jones’s lawsuit.