Jay Z Attends Start Of Trial Over 'Big Pimpin'

Rap mogul Jay Z sat in a Los Angeles courtroom Tuesday while an expert in Egyptian music passed around a large wooden lute.

It wasn’t a high-concept rap video but the start of a civil trial that’s been eight years in the making.

The Brooklyn superstar, whose real name is Shawn Carter, is facing a jury of six men and two women in a lawsuit claiming he and producer Timbaland swiped a portion of an Egyptian love ballad for their 1999 smash hit “Big Pimpin.”

The copyright infringement claim was brought in 2007 by a relative of late Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi. The nephew claims the tune ripped off Hamdi’s 1957 song “Khosara, Khosara" without proper permission.

Jay Z is expected to testify Wednesday and was front and center with Timbaland and their lawyers inside the wood-paneled federal courtroom for opening arguments Tuesday afternoon.

They claim they properly licensed the song from EMI Music Arabia and an Egyptian company, and that Timbaland even wrote a check for $100,000 at one point when approached for compensation.

A lawyer for Hamdi’s nephew Osama Ahmed Fahmy told jurors that Egyptian law states the rap stars needed to get direct approval from Hamdi's estate before overlaying the looped sample with “vulgar and demeaning” lyrics.

“This case is about moral rights, here and in Egypt,” Fahmy's lawyer Peter Ross said.

He argued that Hamdi was the "elegant" son of a physics professor, played violin at a young age and went on to write “beautiful” Middle Eastern music.

Ross claimed that composers like Hamdi have a universal right to protect their music from unwanted association with controversial groups such as skinheads, the Ku Klux Klan or musicians who use their creations for “something vulgar and inappropriate.”

“The only way to get approval" Ross argued, was for Jay Z and Timbaland to go to Hamdi, or presumably his heir, and "play him the changes and get his consent."

Hamdi died in 1993.

Lawyers for Jay Z and Timbaland shot down Ross' claims in their back-to-back opening statements.

They said the music titans first used the sample thinking it was royalty-free but later secured the necessary contract approvals and didn’t even use that much of “Khosara, Khosara” anyway.

“There is a lot of music in ‘Big Pimpin’ that has nothing to do with ‘Khosara,’” Timbaland’s lawyer Christine Lepera said. “It was used as the icing on the cake.”

She said contracts signed by Fahmy and money he received “gave away” his right to bring the lawsuit.

“When you pay for something, don’t you think you have the right to use it?’” she asked the jury.

A lawyer for Jay Z scoffed at the plaintiff's assertion that his client's lyrics were vulgar.

He told jurors that Jay Z's story was one of a "remarkable" rise from a Brooklyn housing project plagued with drugs and crime, and that his style of music should be viewed as "redemptive and transformative."

A musicologist from the University of California at Santa Barbara was the first witness called by the plaintiff. He brought several instruments to court to help demonstrate his knowledge of Egyptian music and is expected to play a portion of “Khosara, Khosara" on a flute when his testimony resumes on Wednesday.

Jay Z, 45, is the husband of pop star Beyonce and has 21 Grammys under his belt.

Timbaland, whose real name is Timothy Mosley, has worked with a long list of stars including Rihanna, Drake, Nas, Madonna and Justin Timberlake.

The 43-year-old now works as a music producer for the Fox hit “Empire,” which stars Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson.

Timbaland writing that $100,000 check says it all ……...

SOURCE