Grand Upright Music Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records, Inc., 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991)

The memorandum and order granting a preliminary injunction against the use of “Alone Again (Naturally)” on the Biz Markie album “I Need A Haircut.” Read in full, from the caption through “SO ORDERED.” and all three footnotes.

What the document is, stated against what it is usually taken to be. It is a preliminary injunction, not a merits ruling on sampling doctrine. The defendants admitted the use in their own Post-Hearing Memorandum at 2, and the court frames the contested question narrowly. The sentence is reproduced here in a block because it contains the court’s own double quotation marks and nesting it inside others would alter its punctuation:

The only issue, therefore, seems to be who owns the copyright to the song “Alone Again (Naturally)” and the master recording thereof made by Gilbert O’Sullivan.

Ownership was the fight. Whether a sample infringes was never put to the court.

The clearance findings, at star page 185. The opinion does not create a clearance requirement; it records one already in force. Each defendant who testified knew a license was necessary “before using the copyrighted work in another piece.” “Warner Bros. Records, Inc. had a department set up specifically to obtain such clearances,” with the Brown and Tillman depositions cited. Cold Chillin’ Records, Inc. “knew that such clearances were necessary.” The August 16 letter from Biz Markie’s attorneys records that Cold Chillin’ knew “other sample clearance requests were pending at that time” and names a prior matter handled properly, “as it did in the situation involving the Eagles samples.”

Footnote 2 refuses the everyone-does-it defense, in full and unnested:

The argument suggested by the defendants that they should be excused because others in the “rap music” business are also engaged in illegal activity is totally specious. The mere statement of the argument is its own refutation.

Note that the body of the opinion recites the same argument as a claim that “stealing is rampant in the music business.” The two recitals do not name the same business.

The referral. The order grants the injunction and then refers the matter “to the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for consideration of prosecution of these defendants under 17 U.S.C. § 506(a) and 18 U.S.C. § 2319.” Footnote 3 keeps that question independent of the civil one.

Retrieval, 2026-08-04. curl returns HTTP 202 on CourtListener, a Cloudflare challenge rather than the document, and the API v4 opinion endpoint returns {"detail":"Authentication credentials were not provided."}. Only a real browser produced the text. A 202 is not a receipt. The url above is not reconstructed: it is the target CourtListener’s own citation resolver returns for 780 F. Supp. 182 (/c/f-supp/780/182/ → 302 → this path, confirmed 2026-08-04). The full capture is preserved at reference/docket/sources/grand-upright-v-warner-780-f-supp-182-1991_MEMO-AND-ORDER-DEC-17_courtlistener_FULLTEXT.txt on the docket branch. Star pagination *183, *184 and *185 is present and matches the published span.

Two transcription hazards in the capture. Do not quote across either. (1) The star page break falls mid-word: the capture reads “from the hold *185 er of a valid copyright,” so the sentence beginning “Each defendant who testified knew” cannot be quoted whole without either reproducing the marker or silently deleting it. Quote the clean fragments instead. (2) The capture carries "consents, permissions or clearances_" with a stray _ character standing where the reporter’s text has a closing mark. That line is not quotable until it is matched against a clean copy. This record has not done that, and does not pretend to have.

Standing correction this record exists to hold. An earlier receipt-gate pass printed the issue sentence as “…seems to be who owns the copyright.” with a period the court did not write. The sentence continues. A truncation that preserves the meaning still asserts something false, that the source’s sentence stopped where ours did.