Miley Cyrus has been sued for $300 million by a Jamaican artist because her 2013 song “We Can’t Stop” allegedly sounds a lot like the 1998 reggae song “We Run Things.”
Michael May, aka Flourgon, says his song reached No. 1 in his home country and has been “a favorite for lovers of reggae music worldwide,” according to Reuters, adding that more than 50 percent of “We Can’t Stop” was lifted from his tune.
May accuses Cyrus and RCA Records of misappropriating his song, particularly his lyrics “We run things / Things no run we” that Cyrus sings as “We run things. Things don’t run we.”
He said that in November he won “formal copyright protection” for all musical arrangements of the song, according to Reuters and Cyrus’s song “owes the basis of its chart-topping popularity to and its highly-lucrative success to plaintiff May’s protected, unique, creative and original content.”
Representatives for Cyrus and Sony Corp., which owns RCA, did not respond to Reuters’s requests for comment.