Ellen fans love the dance-over segment of her show. Record companies don’t.

Large record companies are suing The Ellen DeGeneres Show claiming producers are breaching copyright by playing more than 1,000 songs without permission.

DeGeneres does the nerdy dance routine up and down the stairs between her audience’s seating rows on every show to upbeat numbers such as those by Stevie Wonder.

Defendants in the suit were said to reply to the question of why they didn’t get licences to use the songs, that they didn’t “roll that way”.

The representatives of recording companies in the lawsuit filed in the US District Court in Nashville said: “As sophisticated consumers of music, [the] Defendants knew full well that, regardless of the way they rolled, under the Copyright Act, and under state law for the pre-1972 recordings, they needed a licence to use the sound recordings lawfully.”

The suit claims the daytime talk show has used copyrighted music without permission since its inception, including “recordings by virtually every major current artist of popular music”.

Plaintiffs include Arista Music, Atlantic Recording Corp, Capitol Records, Motown Record Company, Sony Music Entertainment, Virgin Records America and Warner Bros Records.