The 'Alright, Alright, Alright' case against Travis Scott collapsed — not with a settlement, but with a ruling the plaintiffs couldn't survive

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On October 9, 2026, a nearly three-year copyright case against Travis Scott quietly ended. Dion Norman and Derrick Ordogne — the two writers who sued Scott and Sony Music over the "alright, alright, alright" sample in "Stargazing" and "Til Further Notice" — voluntarily dismissed their claims, without prejudice, in a Friday court filing, as first reported by Billboard.

Digital Music News covered the dismissal with a shrugging headline — the case "goes poof" — and a guess: "Presumably, the two parties reached an amicable solution privately." That guess turns out to be wrong, and the real story is more interesting than a private settlement. Per Billboard's reporting, a lawyer for Scott and Sony said no settlement was paid. And the dismissal came, Billboard reported, after a different court ruled that Norman and Ordogne do not own any publishing rights to the song at the center of the case at all.

The lawsuit did not die because the sample question got answered. It died because, as far as the courts are concerned, the plaintiffs stopped being the people with standing to ask it.

What the case was

The underlying dispute was, on its face, a classic sampling fight. Norman and Ordogne filed suit in early 2024 — DMN dates it to January 2024, Billboard to the "beginning of 2024" — alleging that Scott used an uncleared, pitch-altered sample of "Bitches (Reply)," recorded by New Orleans bounce artist DJ Jimi in the early 1990s (DMN dates the track to 1991, Billboard to 1992). The sampled element was a staccato burst of the word "alright" — shouted nine times at the top of the song, per Billboard — which the suit claimed was lifted into "Stargazing," from 2018's Astroworld, and again into "Til Further Notice," from 2023's Utopia. Both tracks reached the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100. An earlier version of the suit also targeted Metro Boomin and James Blake, who co-wrote "Til Further Notice"; both were dropped from the case earlier in 2026.

Two details made the plaintiffs' story look stronger than the average short-phrase claim. First, other artists had a documented history of treating the same sample as something requiring credit: Kid Cudi's "Girls" (2013), Cardi B's "Bickenhead" (2018) and Diddy's "Need Somebody" (2023) had all previously credited Norman and Ordogne for its use — the sort of industry practice that reads as recognition that the sample belongs to someone. Second, per DMN, Scott's team had itself allegedly reached out to the plaintiffs' side at some point to seek clearance — conduct that sits awkwardly next to a later argument that the sample required no clearance at all.

What the defense argued

Scott and Sony's June 2024 motion to dismiss, detailed by Billboard, went after the claim from two directions.

The headline argument was that "alright" is not something anyone can own. "The only alleged copyright infringement here is the alleged copying of the word 'alright,'" the filing argued — "the single word 'alright' and the short phrase 'alright, alright, alright' lack even the minimal creativity required for copyright protection both because these lyrics are too short and because they are commonplace, or stock, expressions." The lawyers catalogued pre-existing uses of the word in songs predating "Bitches (Reply)" — the Beatles' "Revolution," Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright," Earth, Wind & Fire's "Let's Groove" — and cited a 2003 ruling holding that stock phrases like "I can't get enough" were too trite and clichéd to infringe. The U.S. Copyright Office states the baseline rule plainly: "Copyright does not protect names, titles, slogans, or short phrases."

But the motion also raised arguments that had nothing to do with the word's copyrightability — that the plaintiffs had failed to show they held the proper copyright registrations, and that the claims over "Stargazing," a 2018 release, fell outside the statute of limitations. Those quieter arguments are where the case actually went. A phrase can be unprotectable in the abstract and still sit inside a protected sound recording; a sampling claim can be doctrinely alive and still die for lack of a plaintiff who owns the recording.

What the ending actually means

The distinction matters for reading the ending correctly. The dismissal was "without prejudice" — the claims can, in principle, be refiled. DMN's framing implies the door is open for round two. Billboard's reporting explains why it almost certainly isn't: a voluntary dismissal, with no settlement, filed weeks after a separate court ruled the plaintiffs own no publishing rights to the song, is not a pause in a fight. It is the end of a fight the plaintiffs lost before it reached the interesting question.

And the interesting question — whether a shouted, pitch-shifted burst of a single word, lifted from a recorded master, infringes even when the word itself is free for anyone to say — remains unanswered. The Copyright Office's rule covers phrases; sound recordings are separately protectable works; and the space between those two propositions is precisely where Norman and Ordogne's claim lived. DMN's closing observation is correct, even if its settlement guess was not: with the case's dismissal, the legal question surrounding the sample remains unresolved. It will take a plaintiff who actually owns the song — and a sample worth litigating — to ask it again.

The case's real legacy may be cautionary, and aimed at songwriters rather than stars: the sample-clearance credits on Kid Cudi and Cardi B records did not establish ownership; neither, apparently, did the lawsuit's own complaint. Three years of litigation over one of the most recognizable ad-libs in hip-hop ended without a court ever deciding whether that ad-lib belonged to anyone — because the people claiming it, in the end, couldn't prove it belonged to them.

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