Drake's defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group over Kendrick Lamar's 'Not Like Us' was dismissed in October 2025 — but the rapper is fighting on, with the Second Circuit set to hear his appeal on December 4, 2026.
The suit was the legal aftershock of 2024's epochal rap feud. Drake and Lamar, the two biggest rappers of their generation, traded a series of increasingly vicious diss tracks that spring, culminating in Lamar's 'Not Like Us' — a West Coast anthem that called Drake a 'certified pedophile' and became the song of the summer, later winning Record of the Year at the Grammys and anchoring Lamar's Super Bowl LIX halftime show. In January 2025, Drake sued UMG — the label that distributes both artists — in federal court, accusing the company of defamation, second-degree harassment, and deceptive business practices for releasing and aggressively promoting a song he said contained false and damaging allegations. Lamar himself was notably not named as a defendant.
UMG's response was blunt: this was a rap battle, and battle-rap hyperbole is protected artistic expression. In October 2025, Judge Jeannette Vargas agreed, dismissing the case entirely on the grounds that the challenged lyrics were 'nonactionable opinion' — a reasonable listener, she ruled, would not understand the song as presenting verified facts. Drake's team amended and appealed, arguing the ruling created a dangerously broad rule that rap lyrics can never be defamatory, no matter their impact on an artist's reputation or safety.
The appeal has drawn unusual attention from outside the music industry. Legal scholars and social scientists have filed amicus briefs backing UMG, warning that reviving the case would threaten artistic expression and invite courts to police the conventions of an entire art form. On September 21, 2026, the Second Circuit scheduled oral arguments for December 4, when a three-judge panel will decide whether the lawsuit gets a second life through discovery and trial, or dies for good.
The case has split the hip-hop world. Critics call it the ultimate sore-loser move — a superstar who lost a rap battle on wax trying to win it in court, and doing so by suing his own label. Supporters argue that the industry's biggest company profited twice, distributing both sides of a feud while amplifying genuinely serious accusations. Either way, the December hearing will be a landmark moment for the uneasy boundary between diss tracks and defamation law. Outside the courtroom, the feud's aftershocks continued to define hip-hop's biggest rivalry, with fans dissecting every lyric and legal filing as if they were verses in an ongoing battle.