Beyoncé is being sued by the estate of a deceased New Orleans YouTube star:
Beyoncé's apparent appropriation of New Orleans culture stirred controversy with the release of her 2016 single "Formation" — with its groundbreaking video and the song itself nominated for an array of Grammy Awards this year.
But the family of a murdered New Orleans rapper whose voice is sampled on the bouncy track has spurred a new $26 million lawsuit claiming the celebrated pop singer, who recently revealed she's pregnant with twins, stole the copyrighted material.
Messy Mya was shot and killed in 2010.
[As an adjunct to this discussion, I cannot too highly recommend Spider Robinson's 1983 Hugo Award winning short story: Melancholy Elephants . -Ed]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 12 2017, @05:00PM
Culture cannot be "appropriated". Culture evolves, changes, is adapted by other cultures, etc. Does New Orleans think "their culture" was created out of nothing?
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Sunday February 12 2017, @06:08PM
Vanilla Ice begs to differ...
I'm a skateboarder and my culture is appropriated all the time to sell things for companies that dgaf about skateboarding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12 2017, @10:26PM
back in the 90s. People don't remember just how much it was exploited. Sort of like all the people claiming 'open source' or 'free software' support today, who have nothing to do with it, or only provide dumps of 'waste' projects that even they can no longer manager because it has been rendered functionally useless.