A US court has ruled that Katy Perry copied a song and used it in her own 2013 song, Dark Horse.
Katy gave evidence in the week long trial, denying she had ever even heard the 2009 song Joyful Noise by Flame before recording her track. She even offered to perform Dark Horse for the court room when her lawyers were unable to play the song for jurors because of a broken speaker system.
The jury ruled against Katy on Monday.
During the trial, Katy’s lawyers described the beat of both songs as “commonplace”, arguing that because of that, Flame could not claim copyright because of this.
“They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” said Katy’s lawyer Christine Lepera during her closing arguments in court last week.
Katy Perry
Today the court will start work on deciding how much in damages Gray may be owed, considering Dark Horse was one of her biggest hits, it could be a lot of money.
It has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide and the video for the song was the first ever by a female artist to reach a billion views on both YouTube and Vevo. In total, the video has been watched more than 2.6 billion times since its release in 2014.
