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Judge Bans Biggie Abum Due to Illegal Sample
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 By: Kenny Rodriguez
A judge has banned sales of the late Notorious BIG’s 1994 album, Ready To Die, due to copyright violations dealing with music sampling.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell put an immediate stop to all sales of Biggies album after a Nashville jury said the title track contains an illegal sample of the 1992 tune "Singing in the Morning," by the Ohio Players. The ban affects the album in every form, including online downloads and radio airplay.
Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records own the rights to the original Ohio Players recording, and both companies were awarded $4.2 million in punitive damages. Rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs executively produced the album, and the defendants – Bad Boy Entertainment, Bad Boy LLC, Justin Combs Publishing, and Universal Records – plan to appeal the ruling.
In related news, the Los Angeles Police Department is revisiting the Notorious BIG’s 1997 unsolved murder. A new team of police officers was assigned to take a second look at the case, said assistant city attorney Don Vincent.
This comes years after Biggie’s family accused rogue police officer David Mack of murdering him on behalf of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight. The lawsuit ended in a mistrial last summer when previously undisclosed statements were found linking Mack to the murder. The judge ruled that the evidence was deliberately concealed by the police, and ordered the city to pay more than a million dollars to Biggie’s family.
The New York rapper, born Christopher Wallace but also known as Biggie Smalls, was 24 when he was killed in 1997, and was one of the most influential hip-hop artists of the 1990s.
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