Montreal rapper victorious over Lamar’s label

Record company had lead single taken off-line

• Everything seemed to be falling into place for Montreal rapper Jonathan Emile in January 2015. His debut album The Lover/Fighter Document, years in the making, was finished, and its leadoff single, Heaven Help Dem, featured a collaboration with U.S. hip-hop superstar Kendrick Lamar.

A politically charged song about police violence against racial minorities, its release on YouTube and SoundCloud was timed to coincide with Martin Luther King Day in the United States.

But within a week of it being uploaded, the song disappeared from the online platforms when Lamar’s record label filed a complaint of copyright infringement. Instead of rolling out his record, Emile found himself dealing with lawyers and pleading his case to YouTube.

Nearly two years later, Emile is savouring a victory for the little guy after a court agreed the takedown was an unjustified infringement on his moral rights as an artist. In a ruling last month, the small-claims division of Quebec Court ordered Lamar’s record labels Top Dawg Entertainment Inc. and Interscope Records and Interscope’s parent company Universal Music Group to pay Emile a total of $8,000 in material and punitive damages.

In an interview Wednesday, Emile said he hopes the decision will set a precedent for the way major labels treat independent musicians. “Their approach was sort of boot-to-an-ant rather than to have a reasonable dialogue around the release,” he said.

Emile had contacted Lamar in late 2011 to see if the West Coast rapper would provide a verse for Heaven Help Dem. Such exchanges are common in hip hop, a way for established artists to make some quick money and emerging talent to gain instant attention.

Lamar agreed, and Emile says he paid him US$7,500. About a month later, a file arrived by email. “Jonathan Emile, what’s happening homey?” Lamar is heard asking before launching into a rap about the violent deaths of young black men.

It took Emile years to complete his project; meantime, Lamar had gone from being a fellow independent rapper to a superstar with a major record label deal.

Emile said the label executives initially ignored his argument that he owned the copyright of the Lamar verse because he had paid for it. Craig Thorn, a member of Emile’s management team, figures the label did not appreciate the competition as Lamar prepared the release of his breakthrough album To Pimp a Butterfly. And they did their best to squash Emile.

“When you’re talking an independent Montreal artist versus Universal Music, it’s a David versus Goliath type of thing,” Thorn said.

Emile succeeded in getting his single back online after two months, but by then the momentum created by its initial release had died, and the album release was delayed until the fall.

The court determined that not only had Emile suffered financially but “his reputation was negatively affected” by the insinuation that his use of the Lamar verse was a copyright violation.

Canada’s Copyright Act protects artists’ moral rights against the distortion, mutilation or modification of their work. Noel Courage, a partner with Bereskin & Parr LLP in Toronto, said this is the first time he has seen the protection used to compensate an independent musician in Canada.

Because it came from a small-claims court, the decision’s legal weight is limited, but Courage said it is “another idea in the realm of ideas of how to deal with wrongs that people commit with the new technology.”

Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in Internet law, said the decision shines a light on the danger of wrongful takedowns of online material.

“There is real concern that a system that involves removal of content without any court oversight or review is open to abuse or misuse, or perhaps just error,” he said. Such takedowns “can cause real harm to whoever’s posted it, whether that’s the artist in this case, or someone else who has engaged in free speech and posted something critical,” Geist said.

IT’S A DAVID VERSUS GOLIATH TYPE OF THING.