P-Funk Patriarch George Clinton Files $100 Million Copyright Lawsuit Against Ex-Business-Partner Armen Boladian

George Clinton, the music pioneer behind the interlocking bands Parliament-Funkadelic and one of the most sampled artists in all of hip hop, is going to court to try to regain control of the bulk of his famous back catalog. As reported by Variety, Clinton is suing former business partner Armen Boladian and Boladian's Bridgeport Music company for $100 million, alleging that Boladian used fraudulent means to secure copyrights on about 90 percent of Clinton's catalog.

The suit, filed in Florida, also names labels like Westbound Records, Nine Records, Southfield Music, and Eastbound Records, and Clinton held a press conference in front of the legendary Apollo Theater in New York to announce it, placing the conflict between himself and Boladian in stark terms:

"These songs we're talking about is my history…I have to fight for them, I have to make sure that I did not do all of this my whole life and have my family here, not get what's due to them, what they inherit. We don't have a chance to pass down 40 acres and mules to our families. We do not have the copyrights for the songs. So I'm here along with Ben and partners to make sure that Armen does not get what we worked so hard for."

Clinton went on to frame the lawsuit as a fight for artists all across the music industry:

"I encourage all my fellow artists to investigate, interrogate, litigate, unseal, reveal. If we don't get this right, then they win, and I refuse to let them win. This is about my family and the family of the other legacy artists and us being able to give generational wealth to our family from our intellectual property."

(Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

In the suit, Clinton says that during their long business relationship, Boladian withheld millions of dollars worth of royalties from Clinton through a variety of illegal and deceptive accounting tricks. He claims that between 1982 and 1985, Boladian even had multiple versions of contracts between Clinton and himself showing different terms, including pseudonyms and outright made-up names to dilute what should have been Clinton's rightful share of the revenue.

Clinton also takes issue with some of Boladian's aggressive legal actions surrounding Clinton's own work, as Boladian has filed hundreds of separate lawsuits over the years against producers who sampled Clinton's records without permission. His lawsuit claims that despite being a songwriter of many of these sampled songs, he was not included as a plaintiff in any of these suits, meaning he did not share in the millions of dollars that Boladian got from winning them.

The P-Funk catalog is one of the most unique and innovative in recorded music, and the list of artists indebted to Clinton's music is practically endless. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg are two of the most prominent hip hop artists to make use of Clinton's music through prodigious sampling, and in some cases the sampled hooks are now more familiar to most listeners than their original sources.

Boladian's attorney made a press statement of his own, dismissing Clinton's newest suit as the latest of many such failed attempts by the artist:

"This is just the latest in a series of lawsuits that Mr. Clinton has filed against Bridgeport and Armen Boladian over the last 30 years, raising the same exact issues…He has lost each and every time, including in the very courthouse in which he has filed this latest lawsuit. We will obviously therefore be moving to dismiss this lawsuit and will be seeking sanctions."

Clinton did, in fact, lose his first copyright case against Boladian back in 2001, also in Florida, but 20 years later, Boladian lost a defamation suit he had filed against Clinton over claims made in his 2014 book "Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?: A Memoir," which include many of the same matters raised in the newest suit.