Hip-hop star 50 Cent has won a legal battle for his movie Before I Self Destruct. The rapper had recorded an album with the same title until he decided to turn it into a movie, which he wrote and directed. The movie was hit by a lawsuit from novelist Shadrach Winstead in 2010, when he alleged that the rapper stole the idea from his 2008 book, The Preacher’s Son - But The Streets Turned Me Into A Gangster.
Winstead claimed that the rapper “infringed the copyright by publishing and selling an audio visual work coupled with an audio recording”. But the hip-hop star has now been cleared off the charges on grounds that they were misquoted, manipulated or not in the movie at all and that, in any event, they were non-copyrightable short phrases or unpredictable expressions used in the streets such as ‘get the dope’, ‘cut the dope’, Contactmusic reported.