A pair of songwriters dropped their nearly three-year-old copyright infringement case against the star rapper.
Two songwriters have dropped a nearly three-year-old lawsuit that accused Travis Scott of sampling their work without a license on two tracks off his chart-topping albums Astroworld and Utopia.
Dion Norman and Derrick Ordogne, co-writers of the 1992 DJ Jimi song “B—–s Reply,” voluntarily dismissed their legal claims against Scott and Sony Music on Friday (Oct. 9). The court filing, obtained and first reported by Billboard, did not specify whether any settlement was reached to end the lawsuit.
Norman and Ordogne filed suit at the beginning of 2024 alleging Scott included an uncleared sample from “B—–s Reply” on both “Stargazing” from 2018’s Astroworld and “Til Further Notice” off Utopia in 2023. The tracks, which both reached the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, each feature a repetition of the word “alright.”
The lawsuit claimed that these repeated “alrights” were lifted from “B—–s Reply”. Other artists have previously credited Norman and Ordogne to sample or interpolate that portion of their song, including Kid Cudi on the 2013 track “Girls”, Cardi B on 2018’s “Bickenhead”, and Diddy on “Need Somebody” in 2023.
Scott and Sony, which both distributes and publishes the star rapper’s music, argued in response that these “alrights” are not copyrightable. Under U.S. law, copyright protection only extends to original works. Attorneys for Scott and Sony said “trite” and “cliched” repetitions of the common “alright” phrase “lack even the minimal creativity” to meet this standard.
An earlier version of Norman and Ordogne’s lawsuit also targeted Metro Boomin and James Blake, who co-wrote “Til Further Notice.” The two producers were dropped from the case earlier in 2026.
Reps for Norman, Ordogne, Scott and Sony did not immediately return requests for comment on the lawsuit’s dismissal Friday.
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