Rapper and business mogul Shawn Carter (“I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!“), aka Jay-Z, had a smash hit in 2000 with his single “Big Pimpin.” The song features a catchy loop of an Egyptian song from the 1960s called “Khosara, Khosara,” which Jay-Z licensed from one of the children of the song’s creator, Baligh Hamdy. The children inherited the song’s copyright interests upon Hamdy’s death in 1993.
“Big Pimpin,” of course, turned into what Rolling Stone has called one of the top 500 songs of all time. In 2007, however, one of Hamdy’s children, Osama Ahmed Fahmy, sued Jay-Z, EMI publishing and a host of others, claiming that even though Jay-Z had a license to use the song, that license only gave him “economic rights”, i.e., the right to reproduce, perform or distribute the work “without alteration.” As Hollywood, Esq. explains, the plaintifs claim that because Jay-Z altered “Khosara, Khosara” by sampling and looping parts of it and adding his own lyrics on top of it, he violated a concept called “moral rights,” which exist under Egyptian copyright code:
