Beyoncé has been named as a defendant in a copyright lawsuit over the sample that opens Alien Superstar, the third track on her 2022 album Renaissance.
The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California on Monday (August 10), and you can read it in full here.
It lands just over six weeks after a federal judge dismissed an earlier action over the same recording, as MBW reported at the end of June.
Beyoncé was not a defendant in that case, which named her label, her distributor, her publishers – and John Holiday, the artist who records as Foremost Poets.
The plaintiffs this time are Hirose Enterprise LLC, a Delaware company, and Shuji Hirose, the man behind the defunct New York house label Soundmen on Wax.
The other defendants are Parkwood Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Music Publishing, W Chappell Music Corp. and Holiday.
The recording at the center of the case is Moonraker, performed by Holiday and released by Soundmen on Wax as a 12-inch single – styled Moon-Raker on the label – on or about June 10, 1998, according to the filing.
Its spoken-word introduction opens Alien Superstar, a No. 19 hit on the Billboard Hot 100: “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.”
The complaint calls the recording “a fixture of house music” and says its introduction “is among the most recognizable spoken passages in the genre.”
Parkwood released Alien Superstar on July 29, 2022, with no license at all for the Moonraker recording, according to the filing.
It says a license was obtained on or about September 6, 2022, and that it came from Holiday rather than from the party the plaintiffs say owned the recording.
“Holiday purported to license rights he did not own; Parkwood and the other Defendants exploited, and continue to exploit, the resulting infringing work worldwide, including after receiving written notice in or about January 2023 that the use was unauthorized,” the complaint states.
Holiday was paid USD $10,000 plus 0.5% of the royalties from Alien Superstar for that license, as MBW reported in June.
The plaintiffs say Holiday signed away his entire interest in the recording under a written agreement dated January 15, 1998, in return for a flat fee of USD $1,500 and an equal share of publishing revenue.
The original signed copy was lost in 2005, the complaint says, when the storage facility holding the label’s records was burglarized.
The plaintiffs point instead to a course of dealing running over two decades. Further recording agreements with Holiday in December 1999 and April 2000 ran on the same ownership terms, they say, and he was paid USD $1,000 under the 1999 deal.
They also cite two later agreements with Holiday, dated August 7, 2016 and September 14, 2017.
The first, a deal memo covering the Foremost Poets track Funktion One, is cited for letterhead showing the catalog operating under Hirose Enterprise.
In the second, covering two derivative works of Moonraker, they say Holiday dealt with Hirose Enterprise as the party controlling the recording.
The filing also alleges that Holiday spoke to Hirose by telephone on or about August 3, 2022, a month before the license was signed.
“During that conversation, Holiday acknowledged that Hirose is the rightful rights holder of Moonraker and stated that all Parkwood paperwork should be forwarded to Hirose,” the complaint says.
Counsel for the plaintiffs then wrote to Holiday on or about January 30, 2023, copying lawyers for Parkwood and Columbia Records, stating that the use was unauthorized, according to the filing.
“Defendants’ conduct has been knowing and willful,” the complaint states, alleging that Parkwood “released the infringing work with no license at all, then papered its use through a purported license from the wrong party.”
The earlier action was filed on July 29, 2025, in the name of Hirose Enterprises LLC – plural, and registered in Florida – a separate entity from the Delaware Hirose Enterprise LLC now suing.
Hirose Enterprise registered Moonraker with the US Copyright Office, effective March 31, 2025, according to the complaint – four months before the Florida company sued.
The new complaint states that the Florida company never held any interest in the recording and that an August 2025 instrument purporting to assign the catalog to it “conveyed nothing to the Florida Entity.”
The Delaware company has had a lapse of its own. Its certificate of formation was canceled for non-payment of state franchise taxes, and it filed a certificate of revival only on or about April 2, 2026 – eight months into the first lawsuit. The complaint says the effect of revival is that the company stands as though the cancellation never happened.
US District Judge Mark C. Scarsi dismissed the Florida company’s action without prejudice on June 26, 2026, on the grounds that it had not been organized when it sued and so had no standing.
“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,” Judge Scarsi wrote.
Judge Scarsi did not rule on whether the sample had been cleared properly, a point the new complaint makes early: “No court has adjudicated the merits of any claim asserted herein.”
The refiled case is built to close that gap, with Hirose Enterprise LLC and Shuji Hirose suing together and pleading ownership in the alternative, so that whichever party holds the copyright is already before the court.
Three weeks after the dismissal, on July 18, 2026, the parties on the Hirose side signed paperwork to the same end: a confirmatory assignment from Soundmen on Wax to Hirose, a second from Hirose to Hirose Enterprise, and a quitclaim from the Florida company disclaiming anything it might have held. All three are attached to the complaint.
Standing was the second problem the earlier case ran into, and the smaller one. In March 2026, US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong had already dismissed a previous version of the complaint with leave to amend, finding that the plaintiff had not shown the transfers it relied on were ever put in writing – which US copyright law requires. The confirmatory assignments address the later links in that chain. They do not address the first one, and the 1998 contract is still lost.
The new complaint also widens the field of defendants to take in Beyoncé herself, who is said in the filing to own, or hold an interest in, Parkwood, and to be credited as an author of Alien Superstar.
The complaint alleges that Alien Superstar and Moonraker were both performed without authorization across the 56-show Renaissance tour in 2023 and the 32-show Cowboy Carter tour in 2025.
It lists Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, YouTube Music, Pandora and Amazon Music among the services through which the defendants are alleged to have exploited the track.
The suit brings claims for direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, plus a breach of contract claim against Holiday alone.
The plaintiffs ask the court for damages, the defendants’ profits attributable to the infringement, an accounting and a permanent injunction.
A copyright case against Cardi B over Enough (Miami) was dismissed in March 2026, after a Texas judge found the plaintiffs had sued in the wrong place and had no copyright registration for their song when they filed.
In June, a suit against Travis Scott, SZA and Future over Telekinesis was dropped by the plaintiff, just under three months after it survived a bid for dismissal.Music Business Worldwide
