Rick Astley says Yung Gravy track infringed his publicity rights

completemusicupdate.com:

Rick Astley has sued Yung Gravy over the track ‘Betty (Get Money)’, which borrows heavily from the former’s hit and Rickrolling meme classic ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

Though it’s not a copyright case, with Astley claiming that his publicity rights were infringed when Young Gravy’s team employed a soundalike to recreate the ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ vocals within ‘Betty (Get Money)’.Part of the recent trend of new pop songs overtly and heavily interpolating old pop songs, Yung Gravy’s people got all the required permissions from the writers and publishers of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ to incorporate the 1987 song into the 2022 release.Indeed, as a result of licensing the interpolation, the writers of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ – the British 80s pop-making team that were Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman – get all the songwriting credits for ‘Betty (Get Money)’ on the database of US collecting society MLC.However, according to Billboard, Astley’s lawsuit explains that Yung Gravy wasn’t able to get permission to actually sample the original recording of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’.

As a result, the rapper recreated the track hiring singer Popnick to imitate Astley’s voice on the vocals.Now, with the song rights licensed via the deal with Stock, Aiken and Waterman, and with Yung Gravy’s recording being entirely new, no copyrights were infringed by the making and release of ‘Betty (Get Money)’.Meanwhile, from a copyright perspective, Astley himself had no say over the creation of the new track.