BRITISH COURT RULES AGAINST DIDDY: Judge says mogul breached agreement to keep his name out of Britain

*Sean “Diddy” Combs may have been accused of hitting someone in a Hollywood hotel on Sunday, but the rap mogul was on the receiving end of a blow several days later by a British court.


A judge ruled Wednesday that Diddy had breached an agreement with London-based record producer Richard "Diddy" Dearlove not to use the alias "Diddy" in Britain. In a written ruling from London's High Court, Judge David Kitchin said Combs had advertised himself as Diddy in a song on his latest album "Press Play," which violated their deal reached last year.


Combs promised that the offending lyric, "mainline this Diddy heroin," will be removed from the song "The Future" when it is performed in Britain from now on. But Dearlove had argued that people in Britain could still hear the song and see the Diddy moniker on his international sites MySpace and YouTube, where he appears under the "Diddy" alias.


Kitchin found that it was record companies, not Combs himself, who controlled the content of his pages on the Web sites, and those companies were not party to the agreement. The extent of Combs' control over the content of the MySpace and YouTube sites will be addressed in a full High Court trial scheduled for October, unless the two parties can settle the matter out of court.