Every Popular Musician Will Show Up In Some Courtroom Somewhere Someday

noah | July 25, 2008 9:30 am

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• Simon & Schuster has sued both Foxy Brown and Lil Kim for not coming through on books, despite being paid advances. In 2006, Foxy was paid $75,000 in hopes that she’d write an autobiography, while Kim was given $40,000 in 2004 for a novel. (Fiction still gets no respect, even when it’s penned by a famous-ish person.) [Bloomberg via ProHipHop]

• Former Smashing Pumpkins members James Iha and D’Arcy Wretzky-Brown are suing Virgin Records, saying that they’re not being properly compensated for Smashing Pumpkins downloads. Interesting timing, given that downloads of that song from the Batman And A Really Crappy Movie soundtrack shot up from 11 two weeks ago to 10,000-plus last week, thanks to its inclusion in the trailer for The Watchmen. [Reuters]

• Meanwhile, Billy Corgan frenemy Courtney Love is being sued by a management company who says that she hasn’t paid them a 5% commission on last year’s sale of the Nirvana catalog, a portion of which went for $19.5 million last year. [NYT]

• And finally (at least for now), Abkco Music, which controls the rights to the Rolling Stones’ catalog, is suing Lil Wayne over his song “Playing With Fire,” which they claim is a ripoff of the Stones’ “Play With Fire.” They’re also offended that Weezy uses “explicit, sexist and offensive language” in the song, which seems like kind of a strange allegation given that the Stones weren’t exactly saints. [Billboard]