INSIDE THIS REPORT

• A music company claims Beyoncé's team never had the rights to a sample used on "Alien Superstar."
• The singer's camp got a license from the original performer — but only weeks after Renaissance dropped.
• The plaintiff says that license came from the wrong person and now wants an injunction plus damages.

By Samuel López | USA Herald

Beyoncé is once again fighting to keep a thirty-second piece of audio out of a courtroom.

The superstar and her label, Parkwood Entertainment, are facing a renewed copyright lawsuit over the spoken-word intro that opens "Alien Superstar," the club-ready standout from her 2022 album Renaissance. The plaintiff, a company called Hirose Enterprise and its principal, producer Shuji Hirose, says it owns the rights to the sampled material — and that Beyoncé's team never got permission to use it before the record hit shelves.

[ See Hirose Enterprises, LLC et al v. Holiday et al., California Central District Court, Case No. 2:26-cv-08851 [The nature of the suit involves: Property Rights - Copyrights; and Copyright Infringement].

This isn't the first round of this fight. A federal judge dismissed an earlier version of the case in March, finding that Hirose hadn't adequately established ownership of the underlying copyright, and a separate 2025 filing was tossed after the court found Hirose Enterprise didn't legally exist yet when that lawsuit was first filed. Now the dispute is back, and it's aimed squarely at one of the biggest records of the last decade.

A License from the Wrong Person?

At the center of the case is a song called "Moonraker," originally performed by an artist known as John Holiday. According to the complaint, Holiday sold his interest in the work decades ago, and that interest eventually landed with Hirose. Beyoncé's team did secure a license — but not until roughly six weeks after Renaissance was already out, and according to the lawsuit, that agreement came directly from Holiday rather than from Hirose.

If the plaintiff's version holds up, it means Parkwood may have cleared the sample with someone who no longer had the legal standing to grant that permission. Hirose claims it flagged the alleged infringement to Beyoncé's company early on and that the label kept selling and streaming the track anyway. The company is now asking the court for an injunction to stop further distribution, along with damages tied to the song's earnings.

Parkwood has pushed back throughout the litigation and has already beaten one version of this claim in court. Whether this second attempt survives a motion to dismiss will likely turn on whether Hirose can now show, in more concrete legal terms, that it actually held the rights Holiday allegedly signed away.

Why This Keeps Happening to Hit Records

Sample clearance sounds simple in theory: track down whoever performed the material, negotiate a fee, get it in writing. In practice, music rights get sold, inherited, and reassigned so many times over the decades that the person on stage or on the recording is often no longer the person who legally controls it.

That gap is exactly where cases like this one live. A producer digs up an obscure spoken-word or house-music recording, builds something enormous on top of it, and only afterward does a rights holder from decades earlier resurface to say the wrong door was knocked on. When the resulting song becomes a global hit — and Renaissance became the backbone of one of the highest-grossing tours by a female artist in history — the incentive to litigate goes up dramatically.

For an artist at Beyoncé's level, the exposure isn't really about one licensing fee. It's about years of streaming revenue, tour income, and merchandising tied to a single track, all of which becomes a target once ownership is in dispute. That's the pattern playing out again with "Alien Superstar," and it's a cautionary tale for any label sitting on a catalog built from unreleased, obscure, or long-forgotten source material.

The case is ongoing, and neither Beyoncé nor Parkwood has publicly addressed the latest filing.

About the Author

Samuel López is a Senior Legal Analyst at USA Herald, where he covers entertainment law, intellectual property disputes, and high-profile litigation. His reporting focuses on breaking down complex courtroom battles — from music copyright fights to corporate litigation — into coverage that's accurate, sourced, and easy to follow, drawing on years spent tracking how legal disputes unfold in the entertainment industry.

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