American hip hop magazine The Source has been ordered to pay Eminem's legal fees after a federal court ruled the publication violated a temporary restraining order when it published the lyrics of two controversial early Slim Shady tracks in which the rapper makes racist remarks.
The Source has had a long running feud with the Slim Shady camp, and that came to a head at the end of last year when the magazine stumbled across the racist tracks that Eminem recorded in his late teens prior to becoming a successful rapper. Despite Eminem's public apology for the tracks, the magazine continued to hype up the remarks in a bid to discredit Slim Shady in the black community. During that time Eminem's people got a temporary injunction to ban the publishing of the complete lyrics of the raps, which The Source broke when they put said lyrics online in Jan.
The court decided not to fine the magazine for publishing the lyrics, as Eminem's lawyers requested, because the publishers removed them as soon as a legal letter arrived warning them of their injunction violation.
At the same time the court dismissed a countersuit filed by The Source against Shady Records and Eminem himself, in which the magazine claimed it held the rights to the songs.
Commenting on the tracks themselves US District Judge Gerard Lynch said: "It is for fans of hip-hop, and not for this court, to decide what, if anything, this episode means for their opinions of Mathers as a man and as an artist."