President Donald Trump will have to face a copyright lawsuit over his campaign’s use of a song co-written by legendary soul singer Isaac Hayes, after being denied a motion to dismiss the case.
In an order issued on Wednesday (April 2), Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. of the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia denied a motion to dismiss the case brought by Trump’s lawyers which argued, among other things, that the plaintiffs had not proven they actually own the song.
Hayes’ estate and Isaac Hayes Enterprises LLC, a company run by Isaac Hayes III, filed the lawsuit last August, alleging that Trump had played Hold On, I’m Coming – a 1966 hit recorded by the duo Sam and Dave – as the outro music at his rallies without permission.
The original complaint, which can be read in full here, said Trump had used the song at least 133 times between 2020 and 2024.
Hold On, I’m Coming was co-written by Isaac Hayes, who died in 2008, and his heirs claim 50% ownership in the song.
Besides Trump, the original complaint named as defendants Trump’s campaign, as well as a number of organizations that had hosted Trump rallies: the Republican National Committee (RNC), the National Rifle Association (NRA), the political group Turning Point USA, and BTC Inc., a bitcoin and blockchain media company headquartered in Tennessee.
In later amended complaints, the Hayes estate dropped the RNC and NRA as defendants, and the case against BTC Inc. was severed by the court, to be heard separately in a court in Tennessee.
Trump’s lawyers disputed that the Hayes estate actually own the song. They argued that Isaac Hayes Enterprises had assigned its rights in the song to music publishing rights investor Primary Wave.
The Hayes estate disagreed, and asserted that they had taken control of their share of the rights under the US’s “termination rights.”
Under the US’s Copyright Act of 1976, the original author(s) of a song can “take back” their copyright from a publisher (or whoever they assigned the rights to) after a set period of time. For works from before 1978, it’s 56 years.
The Hayes plaintiffs said they had taken back their rights from Warner Chappell Music in 2022, 56 years after Hold On, I’m Coming was released, giving them full control of their half of the song.
They said that they then sold half that stake to Primary Wave in 2023, giving Primary Wave and the Hayes estate a 25% stake each in the song.
“The problem is that none of these key legal events — the alleged termination of the copyright license based on one-half of the ownership in the Work; the alleged transfer of Isaac Hayes’s rights to Hayes Enterprises; or the agreement between the latter and Primary Wave — is documented,” Trump’s lawyers argued in their motion to dismiss filed in January, which can be read in full here.
Early on in the case, Trump’s lawyers also argued that they had a license to use the song, having purchased a blanket license for political organizations from BMI.
However, the court found that in June of last year, BMI emailed the Trump campaign to notify it that the owners of Hold On, I’m Coming objected to the use of the song by the Trump campaign, so it was “excluded from the agreement effective immediately,” in line with a BMI policy that allows rights holders to remove their music from blanket licenses if they object to its use.
Therefore, the court found that the plaintiffs would likely be able to prove that the Trump campaign’s use of the song past June 2024 was without a license and infringed copyright.
By the time they filed the motion to dismiss, Trump’s lawyers had dropped the argument that the campaign had a license from BMI for the song.
“I think that the [plaintiffs’] second amended complaint — in spite of all its problems, and there are quite a few — adequately alleges ownership of the work,” Judge Thrash said in a hearing on Wednesday, as quoted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Hayes case is by no means the only one in which the Trump campaign has found itself in conflict with a popular artist or group over the use of their music.
Dozens of artists, from ABBA to the White Stripes, have at one point or another objected to the Trump campaign’s use of their music.
The Foo Fighters said last summer that they had not OK’d the use of their track My Hero at Trump rallies. Also last summer, the Trump campaign deleted a video featuring Beyonce’s Freedom after the singer blocked use of the song.Music Business Worldwide
