More than a decade after it was released, a judge has stopped sales of Notorious B.I.G.’s album, Ready to Die.
On Friday (March 17), a jury decided that the album’s title track illegally sampled part of the 1992 song “Singing in the Morning” by the Ohio Players, according to AP. The jury then awarded $4.2 million in punitive and direct damages to Bridgeport Music and Westbound Records, which own the rights to Ohio Players’ recordings.
In addition, a ban has been issued on the album and the song in all forms, so don’t expect to find a copy in your local record store or through your favorite download service, and don’t plan on hearing it on the radio, either.
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“We’ve just been battling this for such a long time,” Westbound and Bridgeport owner Armen Boladian told AP. “So many have been settled because companies didn’t want anything to do with it, and we knew we were right.”
In this case, the defendant is executive producer Sean “Diddy” Combs and his company, Bad Boy Entertainment, so clearly they’re not going down without a good fight. Bad Boy, Justin Combs Publishing, and Universal Records plan to appeal the decision, defense lawyer Jay Bowen told AP.
In other Biggie news, new life will be breathed into the investigation into the rapper’s murder in 1997, as a new team of police detectives has been assigned to the case.
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