Bridgeport Music
publishing company that owns the rights to some George Clinton and Funkadelic recordings

Bridgeport Music is a music publishing company founded in Michigan by Armen Boladian in 1969. It controls the copyrights to recordings by George Clinton and Funkadelic. Bridgeport Music has filed lawsuits for copyright infringement via sampling against hundreds of defendants under the federal copyright statute, 17 U.S.C., leading to them to being often described as a "Sample troll". Among others, Bridgeport has sued for sampling infringements in popular music produced by Public Enemy, N.W.A, Jay-Z and The Notorious B.I.G. - a case in which the jury awarded Bridgeport more than $4 million in damages.
Notable court cases
On May 4, 2001 in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. 11C Music, 202 F.R.D. 229' (M.D. Tenn 2001), Bridgeport Music filed a lawsuit alleging infringement of its copyrights in several sound recordings and musical compositions through sampling. It was seeking declaratory judgement, injunctive relief, and damages in around 500 different claims against approximately 800 defendants. The court decided that these cases should all be tried separately, which resulted in 477 individual cases. Notable cases include:
Bridgeport Music, Inc.
The public source identifies “Bridgeport Music” as publishing company that owns the rights to some George Clinton and Funkadelic recordings. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bridgeport, Music and publishing.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16985255. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bridgeport Music” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.