{"id":255489,"date":"2026-04-21T14:07:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T13:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/?p=255489"},"modified":"2026-04-21T14:07:59","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T13:07:59","slug":"drake-pushes-back-on-umg-at-appeals-court-says-judge-improperly-dismissed-not-like-us-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/drake-pushes-back-on-umg-at-appeals-court-says-judge-improperly-dismissed-not-like-us-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Drake pushes back on UMG at appeals court, says judge improperly dismissed \u2018Not Like Us\u2019 case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drake’s legal team filed a reply brief on Friday (April 17) at the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, sharpening their argument that a federal judge improperly dismissed<\/a> the rapper\u2019s defamation lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us.<\/i><\/p>\n

The brief targets UMG Recordings<\/b>, with Drake’s lawyers arguing that the judge’s handling of the case amounts to ‘reversible error,’ pointing to her reliance on materials outside the complaint.<\/p>\n

The reply brief follows two amicus briefs filed earlier this month backing UMG \u2014 one from Yale Law School’s Floyd Abrams<\/a> Institute for Freedom of Expression, and another from a group of legal scholars and social scientists. Drake’s lawyers dismiss the Yale brief’s “consent” argument \u2014 which likened Drake to a boxer, who challenged a champion to a fight, and then sued for battery \u2014 as “imaginative,” noting that consent is an affirmative defense UMG never raised.<\/p>\n

They also push back on amici’s warnings that allowing Drake’s case to proceed would threaten the future of rap, calling that “fearmongering” and arguing that existing defamation and First Amendment protections already safeguard artistic expression.<\/p>\n

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Drake\u2019s legal team at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP<\/b> wrote in the latest reply brief, which you can read here<\/a>: \u201c[T]he District Court relied heavily on matters outside the pleadings, weighed the evidence, made adverse factual findings contradicting well-pleaded facts, and improperly drew inferences against Drake.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUMG repeats the Court\u2019s errors, largely glossing over the allegations in the Amended Complaint and focusing instead on its own version of the \u2018facts\u2019 and \u2018evidence\u2019 from outside the pleadings.\u201d<\/p>\n

They added: \u201cThe District Court failed to abide by those bedrock principles. At a minimum, it was required to convert UMG\u2019s motion to dismiss into one for summary judgment… But it failed to do that too.\u201d<\/p>\n

They argued that Drake never had the chance to contest the evidence and present what he had found in the early stages of discovery.<\/p>\n

<\/div> <\/div> <\/p>\n

Drake originally filed the lawsuit<\/a> in January 2025, roughly eight months after Not Like Us <\/i>dropped, alleging that UMG knowingly published and promoted the song despite its lyrical content being false and defamatory.<\/p>\n

Judge Vargas dismissed<\/a> Drake\u2019s lawsuit in October 2025, ruling that Kendrick Lamar<\/b>\u2019s diss track Not Like Us <\/i>constitutes protected opinion rather than actionable defamation.<\/p>\n

Drake appealed<\/a> the dismissal in January 2026, arguing that \u201cThe District Court Created a Dangerous Categorical Rule that rap diss tracks can never be actionable.\u201d<\/p>\n

UMG filed its own response<\/a> brief late last month, arguing that Drake’s case fails because “he seeks to strip words from their context and deem them actionable defamation.” That brief also argued that Drake had “goaded” Lamar into writing the lyrics he’s now suing over, and that rap diss tracks “signal \u2014 if not shout \u2014 opinion not fact.”<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe District Court dismissed Drake\u2019s defamation claim based solely on its determination that the Recording, Video, and Image contained statements of opinion rather than actionable statements of fact.”<\/p>\n

Drake’s reply brief<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Drake\u2019s brief contends that Judge Vargas made an error by considering the song only within the context of the entire rap battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar.<\/p>\n

In the latest reply brief, Drake\u2019s lawyers said the judge drew on materials never cited in the complaint such as a separate Drake track called Taylor Made Freestyle <\/i>that was only available for one week and \u201cwhose contested lyrics are not even in Drake\u2019s voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drake\u2019s team wrote that the “Court found that a reasonable listener would have understood the Recording\u2019s pedophilia allegations as a \u2018callback\u2019 to Taylor Made Freestyle.<\/i> The reliance on materials outside the pleadings deprived Drake of the opportunity to rebut this counterfactual assertion.\u201d<\/p>\n

They added: \u201cThe Court precluded Drake from rebutting its (and UMG\u2019s) unreasonable inferences.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/div> <\/div> <\/p>\n

The brief also focuses on who was listening to Not Like Us<\/i>. The song was streamed about 96 million<\/b> times in its first week, which according to Drake\u2019s team, \u201cpales in comparison to the 3.65 billion<\/b> \u2018total global views\u2019 of the Super Bowl performance\u201d where Lamar performed the track to an audience of 133.5 million <\/b>viewers.<\/p>\n

Drake\u2019s brief also challenges the argument that rap diss tracks are shielded from defamation claims.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe District Court dismissed Drake\u2019s defamation claim based solely on its determination that the Recording, Video, and Image contained statements of opinion rather than actionable statements of fact,\u201d according to the reply brief.<\/p>\n

Drake\u2019s lawyers said the court \u201ccommitted multiple errors\u201d such as misapplying judicial notice to draw inferences against Drake, replacing the reasonable listener with a rap aficionado, and ignoring the broader social context, among others.<\/p>\n

The rapper\u2019s lawyers asked the Second Circuit to reverse the dismissal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Drake’s lawyers argued that the judge committed \u201creversible error\u201d by considering materials outside the complaint and drawing conclusions against the rapper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":152430,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2167,1161,269],"class_list":["post-255489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-drake","tag-kendrick-lamar","tag-universal-music-group"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255489"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255508,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255489\/revisions\/255508"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.musicbusinessworldwide.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}