On July 6, Jermaine Dupri and his So So Def companies sued Sony Music in Manhattan federal court for more than $18 million. They wanted a full reckoning of what three decades of Xscape, Kris Kross and Da Brat records had earned. Eleven weeks later, on Monday (Sept 21), two brothers from Florida filed a complaint asking Dupri for the same thing.

Van and Patrick Watler recorded "Pick It Up" as Home Team in 1992, on Luther Campbell's Luke Records. They allege that Dupri and Jacquees used lyrics and music from that song, without permission, credit or payment, for a 2023 record carrying the same title.

The brothers want more than $150,000 in damages, a songwriter credit and a share of the publishing income. They also want a full accounting of what the 2023 song earned and an order stopping its sale, and they have asked for a jury.

The complaint sits in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida under the caption Watler et al. v. Mauldin et al. The second name belongs to the producer, who was born Jermaine Dupri Mauldin. 

When Dupri filed against Sony, we reported that the complaint put a price on specific records. It claimed roughly $960,000 was owed on Xscape's 1993 debut alone and about $2.2 million across two Kris Kross albums. It also said Dupri and So So Def began to suspect in 2023 that they had not been paid everything due.

That case never reached a contested courtroom fight. In August, the parties resolved the $18 million suit before Sony filed an answer, no terms were disclosed, and the court made no finding that Sony owed Dupri anything.

The Watlers are now making the same structural demand from the other direction. Their complaint claims the defendants earned hundreds of thousands of dollars through streams, sales, radio play and licensing. It offers no breakdown of that figure and asks the court to order the accounting that would produce one.

Mass Appeal Media, the third defendant, holds the statements that accounting would reach. The company signed Dupri to a collaboration deal in the summer of 2023. The song was his first release under that deal, promoted as the lead single from an EP tied to hip-hop's 50th anniversary. "Pick It Up" remains a standalone single.

The $150,000 threshold in the complaint matches the ceiling the Copyright Act sets for statutory damages when infringement of a single work is found to be willful. Statutory damages are generally available only for works registered before the infringement began, so the date on any registration the Watlers hold will shape how far that number can go.

Two threshold details are at the forefront of this case: The first is whether the Watlers hold a copyright registration for the 1992 composition. The Supreme Court made registration a condition of filing suit in its 2019 decision in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com. Ownership paperwork from the early 1990s has already shaped one major hip-hop catalog fight this year, as our guide to the 35-year termination window showed in the Salt-N-Pepa case against Universal.

The second is which specific lines or melodic phrases the brothers say were copied. The Copyright Office does not protect titles or short phrases, so two songs called "Pick It Up" share nothing a court can weigh on the name alone. The case will rise or fall on what sits underneath the title.

Neither Dupri nor Jacquees had responded publicly to the allegations as of Friday, and no court has found that the 2023 record infringed anything.

Several of Dupri's biggest records lean on older soul and funk, and their credits show how that borrowing gets settled when it is cleared before release. Da Brat's 1994 single "Funkdafied," which he produced, lists the Isley Brothers and Chris Jasper among its songwriters next to Dupri and Da Brat.

Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together," which Dupri co-wrote and co-produced in 2005, goes further. In the second verse, Carey sings lines from Bobby Womack's "If You Think You're Lonely Now" and the Deele's "Two Occasions." The writers of both songs are credited on a record that spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Those credits were negotiated before the records reached the public. The Watlers are asking a federal judge to add theirs three years after the fact, which is why the complaint seeks a writer credit and a publishing share alongside the damages figure.

Nothing about the 2023 "Pick It Up" was presented as commentary on an older record. When the video arrived, Jacquees said in a statement that the song reminded him of "New Jack Swing type vibes."

Under the federal rules, each defendant has 21 days after being served to answer the complaint or move to dismiss it. A motion at that stage would most likely challenge whether the filing identifies protectable expression that the two songs share, rather than a common title, tempo or feel.

If the case clears that stage, discovery would bring the session files, the writer splits and the Mass Appeal royalty statements into the record.