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My buddy John Council wrote in Texas Lawyer:

5th Circuit Rules in Rappers' Battle Over Phrase 'Back That Ass Up'

As often happens in the hip-hop world, two rappers became embroiled in a dispute over who owned the rights to a song that utilized a popular phrase. And it took the musical ear of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to settle the matter.

Positive Black Talk Inc., et al. v. Cash Money Records, et al. plunged the conservative appellate court into the world of booming bass lines and popular street slang.

Chief Judge Carolyn Dineen King, who wrote the opinion, boiled the case down to a dispute between Louisiana rappers Juvenile and D.J. Jubilee over who owned the rights to a song "that included the poetic four-word phrase 'back that ass up.'"

...

Judges and juries usually come up with wildly divergent results when they're asked to answer substantial-similarity questions in music copyright cases, says Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University.

"Courts don't have a good formula for this," Vaidhyanathan says of the Cash Money Records decision. Such cases force judges and juries to act as music critics and music historians to reach their decisions. And rap music is a battleground in these types of copyright disputes because the artists commonly take the current language of the street and turn it into songs -- songs that may be similar to another performer's, he says.

"Substantial-similarity cases become thorny," says Vaidhyanathan, author of the book "Copyrights and Copywrongs." "And you're asking judges and juries to do readings of very complicated texts. They're going to come up with wildly divergent results."