Music and the courtroom are two things that should never co-exist. Sadly, they’ve learned to live hand in hand as artists attempt to protect what they view as rightly theirs and simultaneously line their pockets. It’s a facet of the industry that we just sadly accept as the pay for making music goes down and the need for a profitable ‘brand’ increases. One man who knows this most of all is Jay-Z, one of the richest men in hip hop.
One would presume the catalyst for making musicians enter a law of court would solely be down to a copyright infringement by another artist. While this is the most common occurrence, it’s not always that straightforward, and sometimes it can enter a rather surreal territory.
These court cases can pit artists against people from completely different walks of life who, unbeknownst to them, have found themselves accidentally trespassing on intellectual property, that is the destiny that befell a winner of Gordon Ramsay’s TV show Hell’s Kitchen.
The story goes that Hova took issue with the name of the newly-crowned champion’s restaurant. Safe to say, when Newcastle native Terry Miller won Hell’s Kitchen in 2005, he expected his life to change, but a legal battle with Jay-Z is one thing that he didn’t foresee on the horizon.
In 2006, Jay-Z lodged a lawsuit against Miller because his Newcastle restaurant, Rockafella, was too close name-wise to Roc-A-Fella records and remarkably, this case rumbled for five whole years before the chef was instructed to change the name of the eatery.
“I’ve had enough of this whole naming thing now. It’s been a headache all along and has been rumbling for years,” Miller said in 2011. Sadly in 2014, the chef was declared bankrupt after admitting he was “mortgaged to the hilt”.
One can understand Jay-Z’s hesitance to let such an instance go by. With record sales now a secondary income for artists, Hova was clearly intent on protecting his name and the name of his business — you don’t become hip hop’s first billionaire without being savvy.
