A federal lawsuit has been filed in the Southern District of New York against John Cena, WWE, TKO, and several others, alleging that the production of Cena’s iconic entrance music, “The Time Is Now,” illegally sampled copyrighted material. The timing of the suit is notable, arriving just over a week before Cena is scheduled to wrestle his retirement match.
According to POST Wrestling, the complaint was submitted by Kim Schofield, the daughter of the late Canadian bandleader Pete Schofield, who claims ownership of the copyrights to a specific instrumental arrangement. The core of the intellectual property dispute revolves around the memorable horn intro and outro found in Cena’s theme.
Schofield asserts that these horn arrangements, which form the structural backbone of the popular theme song, were originally created by her father for a 1974 cover of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” and were not present in the original Bobby Russell composition.
You can listen to it below:
The producer of Cena’s theme, Jacob “Jake One” Dutton (also named as a defendant), confirmed this sourcing in a 2021 video, where he explained that he looped the intro and outro from the Schofield recording back in 2003 to construct the beat. However, Kim Schofield contends that her family was unaware of the sampling until 2015, when a journalist researching the song informed them.
Schofield is asking the court to void a previous 2017 settlement agreement with WWE, in which she received a one-time payment of $50,000. She alleges that WWE withheld critical information during the negotiation to minimize the value of the sampled work.
Specifically, the lawsuit claims the settlement was finalized just two days before a national Toyota ad campaign premiered featuring Cena’s theme, an upcoming promotion that WWE allegedly never disclosed to the Canadian family. The filing asserts that WWE dismissed the family’s request for writing credit as “greedy” and told them the song had “limited value.”
The lawsuit is complex as it also names the music publisher (Pix-Russ Music) and the original composer’s widow, Cynthia Jo Russell, as defendants. Schofield’s position is that the horn parts are a protectable original work separate from the underlying Russell composition, a claim that the Russell estate has challenged, arguing that the Schofield arrangement itself is an unauthorized derivative work.
In addition to invalidating the settlement, Schofield is seeking to recover damages exceeding $150,000 and is also challenging a 2019 version of Cena’s theme, arguing its unauthorized re-recorded imitation of the horn part violates the terms of the original settlement.
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