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Judge throws out Lohan’s Pitbull lawsuit

By | Published on Monday 25 February 2013

Pitbull

A US judge has thrown out a lawsuit being pursued by Lindsay Lohan against Pitbull. Lohan took offence at a line from the rapper’s 2011 track ‘Give Me Everything’ in which he alluded to the singer-actress’s runs in with the law with the line: “Hustlers move aside, so I’m tiptoeing, keep flowin/I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan”.

Although Pitbull apologised for any offence caused by the rap, Lohan sued under New York law claiming her publicity and privacy rights were violated by the track.

It was an ambitious legal claim, and when it finally got to court this month the judge unsurprisingly said that works of art are exempt from the New York laws on which Lohan relied, and that the First Amendment gazumped the lawsuit.

Lohan tried to claim the song was a commercial venture not a work of art, but the judge knocked that argument on the head, saying that just because something was “created and distributed for the purpose of making a profit” doesn’t stop it being art.

As previously reported, Pitbull counter-sued Lohan in 2011. The counter-suit disputed Lohan’s claims, questioned her ability to sue under New York law as a Californian resident, and sought a sanction against the plaintiff for filing a “frivolous lawsuit”.

On the latter point, the judge said that case law on this issue to date had been limited, so that while Lohan’s litigation was ambitious, it couldn’t be considered ‘frivolous’.



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