Beyonce about to get sued!!

News just leaked that mega-star Beyonce Knowles will be taking the stand in a Chicago federal court on December 10 to defend Destiny Child’s usage of the song “Cater 2 U.” The song was featured on the group’s final and multi-platinum album Destiny Fullfilled. Local Chicago artist Ricky Allen filed allegations of copyright infringement back in 2006. According to the blog theboombox.com, “Allen copyrighted his 'Cater 2 U' in the mid-1990's, performing the tune around Chicago and updating its copyright three times, most recently in 2000. He claims he delivered a copy of his song to Chicago producer Maurice Joshua, who Allen planned to collaborate with on a demo. Though the demo never came to fruition, Joshua later recorded a song with Destiny's Child, but claims he never had a copy of Allen's song.”
A Chicago judge has ruled that enough evidence exists for Allen's case to go before a jury in Chicago's federal court, citing Joshua as a plausible link between Allen and Knowles."Do we say [Beyonce's] responsible for copying? Yes. But there's no such thing as innocent copying, even if it's unintentional," argued Allen's lawyer. "The jury will decide the notion that these are simple coincidences."
We see this type of allegation being made all the time with major artist. I’ve often heard that many major artists don’t except demos from local artists because their afraid of these kind of allegations backfiring on them. If Ricky Allen is to have a legitimate claim and own the copyrights to this song, more power to him for having his intellectual property protected. Many artists don’t know the value of having their material copyrighted through the government and are left with a great song and no money or credit to show for it. I’ve known the process of copyrighting sound recordings online for a while now, and it is not the easiest of task if you’re not familiar with the terms, but its doable and fairly inexpensive. It is only $45 to upload a maximum of ten songs at a time, and it can all be done online.
According to the RIAA, the Destiny Fullfilled album has sold over 3.5 million copies. Now hypothetically speaking lets say that Ricky Allen’s case proves to be legit, I think it is safe to say that he will make a pretty penny off back paid royalties. I’m taking a music publishing course this semester and I’m very curious to see what my professors have to say about this case, and if they can give me some sort of estimation to how much Ricky could make off of this settlement assuming he wins. So a lesson learned from this case is- local artist protect what’s yours, and major make sure you know what’s yours and what’s not.