Big Pimpin' Jury Will Be Biased By Jay Z’s Wealth, Says Attorney

A long-running dispute between rapper Jay Z and plaintiffs acting on behalf of Egyptian composer Osama Ahmed Fahmy is in the pre-trial stages. Jay Z’s attorneys reacted sharply to a motion that the rapper reveal his net worth – recently estimated at $550 million by Forbes – calling it irrelevant and an attempt to “bias the jury” and “artificially inflate the size of a potential damages award.” Fahmy’s attorneys argued that while a lesser entity, a Russian peasant for example, might understandably infringe without taking adequate steps to research copyrights, someone of Jay Z’s means must have done so willfully. The question of “willfullness” will be a key issue in the trial.