Pryor Cashman Wins Dismissal of All Claims Against Elton John and Bernie Taupin in Copyright Case Involving Song “Nikita”
Pryor Cashman has won dismissal of all claims brought against Sir Elton John and his longtime songwriting partner Bernie Taupin in a music copyright infringement case pending in U.S. District Court in Chicago, Illinois.
In the case, plaintiff Guy Hobbs, a photojournalist and aspiring songwriter, claimed that the lyrics of Elton John’s 1985 hit song Nikita infringed Hobbs’s lyrics entitled Natasha, which he claimed to have circulated among music publishers in 1984. Hobbs’s lyrics, which were never put to music, were inspired by his doomed cruise ship romance with a Russian waitress. Hobbs claimed that Nikita copied numerous elements from his lyrics, including the theme of “an impossible love affair between a Western man and a Communist woman during the Cold War,” a “postal theme,” references to the woman’s pale eyes and certain phrases.
In Nikita, which was made into a music video directed by Ken Russell, Elton John sings of his love for a border guard he has seen “by the wall” with her “[t]en tin soldiers in a row,” and she “look[s] up through the wire” as “[g]uns and gates” “hold [her] in.”
In August 2012, Pryor Cashman filed a motion to dismiss the complaint on the grounds that the alleged similarities of “themes” cited by Hobbs are insufficient to constitute copyright infringement. On October 29, 2012, the Court granted Pryor Cashman's motion, dismissing the complaint in its entirety.
U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve rejected Hobbs’s arguments and granted John’s and Taupin’s motion to dismiss his complaint as a matter of law, finding that each of the elements allegedly copied were “rudimentary, commonplace, and standard,” making them unprotectable under copyright law. The court also noted fundamental dissimilarities between the works, including that the love affair in Hobbs’s lyrics was doomed because the Russian waitress sailed off on another ship, while Elton John’s song is about an East German border guard whom the man admires from afar but never meets, so that the two works “tell different stories.”
The court concluded its decision by sating that “after filtering out the non-protected elements, no similarities exist between the two songs except for generic themes, words and phrases…. In sum, the similarities highlighted by Hobbs are not sufficiently unique or complex to establish copyright infringement.”
Elton John, Bernie Taupin, and publisher Big Pig Music were represented by Pryor Cashman Litigation Partners Tom J. Ferber and Ilene S. Farkas and associate Stephanie Kline.
To read the full decision, please click here.
To read an article about the case that recently appeared in Law360, please click here.
