The songwriter who sued Drake claiming the chorus of Janice STFU was copied from his demo has dropped his lawsuit.
Aviel Calev Hirschfield filed a notice in federal court in Los Angeles on Tuesday (October 27) withdrawing the case in its entirety.
That was 11 days after the complaint was filed on October 16 against Drake, his OVO Sound label, UMG Recordings, and Universal Music Publishing.
Hirschfield’s notice, obtained by MBW, can be read in full here.
The notice states that Hirschfield “hereby dismisses the action in its entirety without prejudice.”
The wording means Hirschfield is not barred from bringing the same claims again at a later date.
The notice does not give a reason for the withdrawal, and no court has ruled on whether Janice STFU copied Hirschfield’s work.
For Drake, OVO, and Universal, the dismissal removes, for now, a claim on the profits of a track that the complaint described as “Drake’s biggest hit in years.”
The complaint alleged that OVO released Janice STFU under an exclusive license to Republic Records, a division of UMG, and that Universal Music Publishing administers the song’s publishing rights.
It described Hirschfield, who is based in Portland, Oregon, as a “Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist, producer, and engineer.”
He is best known, according to the complaint, for producing and co-writing Heated, a track from Beyoncé’s 2022 album Renaissance that also credits Drake as a writer.
Hirschfield claimed he recorded his chorus over an instrumental by FnZ, the production duo of Michael Mulé and Isaac De Boni, finishing it in his home studio around January 25, 2026.
He said the chorus was “loosely inspired” by hearing Lykke Li’s I Follow Rivers during a car ride. Janice STFU itself interpolates the same song.
According to the complaint, he sent the recording to FnZ and other producers who work with Drake, but got no response.
Janice STFU was released on May 15, 2026, as part of Drake’s album Iceman.
“Fifteen seconds in, Avi was stunned to hear Drake perform word-for-word, note-for-note, the exact same chorus that he (Avi) had recorded and sent around to FnZ and other producers who work with Drake,” the complaint stated.
Hirschfield’s complaint added: “The similarities between the chorus in that Copyrighted Work and the chorus in Janice STFU are beyond striking: Janice STFU’s chorus is literally identical to the Copyrighted Work in lyrics, melody, and cadence.
“There is such identity between the two that no assertion of independent creation or coincidence can be made with a straight face.”
The lawsuit said that Drake’s side had rejected evidence supplied by Hirschfield’s team before the case was filed.
It reads: “Even after Avi’s manager provided Drake’s representatives the musical ‘stems’ from the recording software that Avi used in January 2026, with metadata intact, proving that he wrote and recorded the chorus for Janice STFU long before Drake started working on the song, Defendants still shamelessly refuse to acknowledge Avi’s authorship of the chorus, and to credit and compensate him for the same.
“Indeed, without a hint of irony, Drake enlisted his litigation counsel to send a cease-and-desist letter to Avi demanding that he refrain from publicly stating – honestly – that he wrote Janice STFU’s chorus.”
It further alleged that Drake “and/or his representatives are instead taking the absurd position that Avi – a massive fan of Drake who has co-written a hit song with him in the past and has aspirations of working with him in the future – has manipulated the metadata in his recording files to make it appear (falsely) that the Copyrighted Work preceded Janice STFU. Such a deception would constitute career suicide by Avi.”
Hirschfield’s complaint did not specify a damages figure.
It asked for his actual damages, plus the profits the four defendants made from the alleged infringement.
As an alternative, it sought damages set by law, which are capped at USD $150,000 for each work infringed where the infringement is found to be willful.
With a single work at issue, that was the most Hirschfield could have been awarded this way. The complaint also asked for his legal fees.
However, Hirschfield’s demo was registered as an unpublished work, with the registration taking effect on July 21, 2026, more than two months after Janice STFU came out.
US copyright law generally rules out both damages set by law and legal fees where infringement of an unpublished work began before it was registered, as MBW noted last week.
This would likely have left actual damages and a share of the song’s profits as Hirschfield’s routes to compensation.
The complaint said Janice STFU had passed 300 million streams on Spotify and was Drake’s first song in nearly a decade to hold the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for multiple weeks.
Drake previewed an early version of the track, then titled That’s Just How I Feel, during an Iceman livestream on September 4, 2025.
Hirschfield began composing his chorus around three months later, in December 2025, according to the complaint.
A transcription of the preview’s lyrics, published in September 2025, did not appear to include the disputed chorus, MBW reported in its original story on the lawsuit.
A representative for Drake told TMZ on October 16: “These allegations are categorically, unequivocally, and completely denied. There is not one iota of truth to these accusations.”
The representative called the lawsuit a “manufactured and baseless attempt” to exploit Drake’s name, adding: “Drake wrote this song and has no connection or knowledge of this person full stop.”
“The complaint speaks for itself,” a representative for Hirschfield told Rolling Stone last week, before the case was withdrawn. “This song was written specifically for Drake using music provided to [Hirschfield] that was created by Drake’s producers.”
His camp also told Rolling Stone that “multiple experts” had examined Hirschfield’s metadata and found it to be legitimate.
Rolling Stone reported on Tuesday that the withdrawal came days after the magazine had sent follow-up questions to Hirschfield’s attorney.
MBW has contacted representatives for Hirschfield and UMG for comment.
The lawsuit had made Drake and UMG co-defendants while the two remain on opposite sides of a separate legal fight.
Drake sued UMG for defamation in January 2025 over its release and promotion of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us.
A federal judge in New York threw out that case in October 2025, ruling that the song’s lyrics were opinion rather than statements of fact.
Drake appealed, and lawyers for both sides are due to argue the case before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on December 4.Music Business Worldwide
