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Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImageLast year, a Hungarian singer filed a lawsuit against Beyonce claiming the diva used her voice without permission on her chart-topping hit, “Drunk in Love” with Jay Z. However, a judge has ruled in The Carter’s favor, according to the New York Post‘s Page Six.
Monika Miczura Juhasz, known as Mitsou, said in a civil suit filed in New York City that Beyoncé recorded her voice in 1995 while she was singing a traditional Roma folk song called “Gypsy Life on the Road,” which she learned from her grandmother.
Although the singer’s voice can be heard across a minute and a half of the song’s five and a half minutes, the Post reports that Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern tossed Mitsou’s case because she was suing under the state’s Civil Rights Law which protects against a “name, portrait, picture or voice used for advertising or trade purposes without written consent,” but the judge ruled that “courts have consistently held that Civil Rights Law does not apply to works of literary and artistic expression. It is undisputed that the ‘Drunk in Love’ song and video are works of artistic expression and, pursuant to well established law, they are therefore exempted from the Civil Rights Law.”
Mitsou had been seeking unspecified monetary damages claiming the “blatant unauthorized use of [her] voice for trade purposes is causing irreparable harm and emotional distress.”
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