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One of the many perks of being a famous musician is the boatloads of money you can make by simply giving someone permission to use one of your songs for their own purpose. However, there are some people who refuse to go that route—including the Beastie Boys, who’ve taken the parent company of Chili’s to court for allegedly stealing one of their songs.
The Beastie Boys (the trio comprised of Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Michael “Mike D” Diamond, and the late Adam “MCA” Yauch) burst onto the scene in the 1980s with the crude, party-centric brand of hip-hop that helped them become some of the first white rappers to burst into the mainstream.
The group’s sound evolved and matured in the years that followed as they continued to pump out plenty of jams, including one of their most recognizable tracks: “Sabotage,” the single on 1994’s Ill Communication that can credit a good chunk of its success to the fairly iconic music video directed by Spike Jonez.
Now, “Sabotage” has found itself at the center of a lawsuit the Beastie Boys recently filed against Brinker International—the company that owns Chili’s—stemming from a claim the casual restaurant chain illegally used it in a social media ad.
The lawsuit, which was filed in a federal court on Wednesday, claims Chili’s produced a video in 2022 that featured snippets of “Sabotage” along with “three characters wearing obvious 70s-style wigs, fake mustaches, and sunglasses who were intended to evoke the three members of Beastie Boys perform[ing] scenes depicting them robbing ingredients from a Chili’s restaurant.”
When Yauch passed away in 2012 following a battle with cancer, his will stated none of his music could be licensed for commercial use. In 2014, Monster Energy was hit with a $1.7 million judgment for copyright infringement, and the Beastie Boys are seeking a relatively tiny $150,000 from Chili’s for harnessing “Sabotage” without their permission.
I spent far, far more time than I care to admit scrolling through the hundreds of posts on Chili’s TikTok and Instagram channels in an attempt to find the offending video in question, but it would appear it’s been successfully scrubbed from the internet.
With that said, there are plenty of other potentially legally dubious posts featuring copyrighted songs and clips from movies and television shows that are still alive and well, so it’ll be curious to see if Chili’s finds itself sliding down a slippery slope if this case doesn’t end up going in their favor.