Usher and his protege Justin Bieber have been slapped with a $10 million lawsuit regarding Bieb’s 2010 hit “Somebody to Love.” Songwriter Mareio Overton and singer Devin Copeland, known as De Rico, have a song of the same name and are accusing them of copyright violation, saying the track has the same time signature, beat pattern and similar chords and lyrics to their song, Reuters reports.
“After listening to the Copeland song and the Bieber and Usher songs as wholes, we conclude that their choruses are similar enough and also significant enough that a reasonable jury could find the songs intrinsically similar,” Circuit Judge Pamela Harris wrote to the appeals court.
Sony/ATV Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group are among the defendants.
Overton and Copeland alleged that they brought the song to Usher in 2008, and that he liked it so much that he took it to Bieber.
The case was dismissed in March of 2014 by a U.S District Judge who felt that a jury would not be able to see any copyright infringement. However, Harris said that the lyric “somebody to love” was sung in “almost identical rhythm and a strikingly similar melody.”