Beyoncé‘s label and management company Parkwood Entertainment has won the dismissal of a copyright lawsuit over the sample that opens her 2022 track Alien Superstar.
A federal judge threw the case out on a basic procedural defect: the company that filed it, Florida-based Hirose Enterprises LLC, was not legally formed until eight days after it sued.
The judge did not rule on whether Parkwood properly cleared the sample, deciding the case on standing before reaching any of the parties’ arguments on the merits.
In an order dated Friday (June 26), which you can read in full here, US District Judge Mark C. Scarsi granted Parkwood’s motion to dismiss and threw out the entire action “for want of standing” in the Central District of California.
Quoting the spoken-word line at the center of the dispute, Judge Scarsi opened his analysis: “Please do not be alarmed, remain calm: like the DJ booth referenced in the works at issue, this district judge must conduct a troubleshoot test of the entire system — that is, a jurisdictional inquiry — before reaching any of the parties’ merits arguments.”
“Plaintiff had no legal existence at the time it brought suit … so it cannot have held a stake in the outcome of the litigation at the time it filed the complaint.”
Mark C. Scarsi, US District Judge
“Plaintiff had no legal existence at the time it brought suit … so it cannot have held a stake in the outcome of the litigation at the time it filed the complaint,” the judge wrote.
The suit was filed in July 2025 by Hirose Enterprises LLC, which claimed to own the 1998 recording Moonraker by John Holiday, the house artist known as Foremost Poets.
A sample of that recording’s spoken-word introduction opens Beyoncé‘s Alien Superstar: “Please do not be alarmed, remain calm. Do not attempt to leave the dancefloor. The DJ booth is conducting a troubleshoot of the entire system,” according to the complaint.
Parkwood had cleared the sample directly with Holiday, who granted it a non-exclusive license to use Moonraker in Alien Superstar in September 2022.
Holiday was paid USD $10,000 plus 0.5% of the royalties from Alien Superstar, which reached No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100, according to Billboard.
Hirose Enterprises is controlled by Shuji Hirose, the principal behind the now-defunct label Soundmen on Wax, which it says bought the Moonraker rights from Holiday in 1998.
The company argued that it, not Holiday, owned the copyrights and should have been part of the clearance; Parkwood countered that no paperwork documented that purported transfer.
In an earlier ruling on March 25, US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong dismissed a previous version of the complaint with leave to amend, finding that Hirose had not shown the rights transfers it relied on were ever put in writing, as US copyright law requires.
The standing problem then surfaced in the amended complaint, in which Hirose Enterprises conceded it was formed on August 6, 2025 – after its July 29, 2025 filing.
Hirose argued that a separate, similarly named entity – Delaware’s Hirose Enterprise LLC, listed as the claimant on the copyright registration – could be substituted into the case to fix the defect, but it never filed a motion to do so.
Because the court found it never had jurisdiction, Judge Scarsi said it was “powerless to grant leave to amend,” and directed the clerk to enter judgment.
The dismissal was issued without prejudice, and Hirose Enterprises has the right to appeal, Billboard reported.
The outcome echoes a copyright case against Cardi B that a Texas judge dismissed in March, partly because the plaintiffs had not registered their copyright when they filed.
Major artists face a steady stream of such claims, among them a 2025 suit against Travis Scott, SZA and Future over their track Telekinesis.
Beyoncé was not named as a defendant in the case, which targeted Parkwood, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Music Publishing, W Chappell Music Corp. and Holiday.Music Business Worldwide
