All those YouTube videos you watch where performers take popular songs and dub their own lyrics over it — that could have been illegal today if the Supreme Court ruled differently in a case between a music label and the rap group 2 Live Crew. The group decided to make a spoof of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman.” Acuff-Rose Music, on the other hand, was not enthused with the idea of a reworking of their song, refusing to grant 2 Live Crew a license. So the crew pressed on anyway, releasing their work without a license, leading to a lawsuit filed six months later.

On this day, March 7, in 1994, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the rappers, holding that parodies are covered under the fair use doctrine, and the money collected by commercial work parodying another does not owe anything to the source material.

For reasons known only to him, Supreme Court Justice David Souter appended the lyrics to both songs to his opinion, making 2 Live Crew perhaps the only rap group whose work can be found in most major law libraries around the nation.