George Clinton will face trial to determine if a portion of the Parliament-Funkadelic recording catalog is co-owned by the estate of Bernie Worrell.

The late keyboardist’s estate initially filed its copyright lawsuit in 2022. On Wednesday, May 27, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a dismissal by a lower court in Michigan last September, which held that the statute of limitations for the estate’s claim for co-ownership of recordings made between 1976 and 1979 had expired. The Sixth Circuit did not find whether the Worrell estate’s claims are legitimate, but rather held that they should be decided on by a jury.

The core dispute of the Worrell estate’s suit pertains to a 1976 contract between the keyboardist, who passed in 2016, and Clinton, in which the former signed away his share of Parliament-Funkadelic’s masters in exchange for royalties. The parties largely operated in accordance with this agreement for decades, through legal battles regarding royalty splits, until 2020, when Clinton and his company, Thang, Inc., claimed that the deal was void because Clinton never countersigned it.

The Worrell estate’s appeal argued that by this ruling, Worrell never stopped owning his share of the masters, and that the statute of limitations would only date to when Clinton and Thang first “plainly and expressly repudiated” the ownership in 2020. The court found that Worrell may have reasonably understood Clinton and Thang’s failure to pay royalties as a contract dispute, rather than a fundamental repudiation of his copyright ownership, but limited the scope of the trial to songs created in that contract’s window of 1976 and 1979.

“Having successfully argued in New York state court that the 1976 Agreement never governed their relationship with Worrell, Clinton and Thang must live with the consequence that federal copyright law, not contract law, now controls,” Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote, per Music Business Worldwide.

Clinton’s attorneys argued that the Worrell estate’s lawsuit should be dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence that the keyboardist co-wrote Parliament-Funkadelic material. As with the statute of limitations question, the Sixth Circuit found that this point was debatable and best decided by a jury.

“To start, we need look no further than Clinton’s own admissions. He recognized in this litigation that Worrell ‘radically charted the course of emerging keyboard technology during the golden age of analog synthesis,’ and that he brought to the table a ‘sonic stew’ including ‘perfect pitch and a well-honed facility with a classical canon,’” the judges wrote, per Billboard. “These statements contradict any suggestion that Worrell was just a session player or hired hand.”

Unless a settlement is reached, the Worrell estate and Clinton’s legal advisors will hold a trial in the federal district court. Clinton is also currently involved in a lawsuit against Universal Music Group, alleging more than $1.1 million in withheld royalties. Read more about that case here.