Photo Credit: Chris Brown by Eva Renaldi / CC by 2.0
Chris Brown earns his first Diamond cert thanks to his collaboration with Drake, ‘No Guidance,’ the subject of a major copyright infringement lawsuit.
Chris Brown and Drake’s 2019 collaboration, “No Guidance,” has been certified Diamond per the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Tuesday, November 12, having sold over 10 million units.
The honor, which is Chris Brown’s first Diamond cert, comes as the song is currently the subject of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by artists Tykeiya Dore and Marc Stephens. The pair sued Brown and Drake for at least $5 million for the damages caused by the track being allegedly stolen from their 2016 song, “I Got It.”
Filed in New Jersey, the lawsuit claims that Drake, Brown, and other songwriters behind “No Guidance” actually took the song’s main lyric from “I Got It” and changed it to “You got it.” They allege that aside from this minor change, the track uses “the same chord progressions, tempo, pitch, key, melody, harmony, rhythm, structure, phrasing, and lyrics” as Dore and Stephens’ song.
“It’s impossible to not hear the two songs are substantially similar,” the complaint reads, citing a now-deleted YouTube video comparing the two.
In addition to Brown and Drake, the lawsuit names co-writers Velous, Nija Charles, and Michee Lebrun as defendants, alongside producers Noah “40” Shebib, Vinylz, J-Louis, and Teddy Walton. Several music publishers behind “No Guidance,” such as Brown’s label RCA Records, are also named in the suit.
Strangely, the lawsuit also requests damages from YouTube and parent companies Google and Alphabet for defamation against Stephens stemming from a dispute over a YouTube takedown notice. Stephens says YouTube deleted his channel earlier this year after he filed a takedown request over “No Guidance,” with the company replying that “some of the info in the takedown request may be fraudulent.”
This isn’t actually the first lawsuit to hit “No Guidance since its release in 2019. The song was also the subject of a separate copyright lawsuit in 2021, which was eventually dropped altogether.