Kanye West Sued!

Naph

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Not very exciting news, but I know there are some people who like to see him squirm.

Kanye West Sued Over Sample From 2006

From his remix of Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls"

Kanye West is facing legal action regarding an allegedly uncleared sample used in his remix of Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls", which appeared on the 2006 mixtape Freshmen Adjustment 2,as AllHipHop reports. West is being sued for $500,000 by singer Robert Poindexter of the Persuaders, whose track "Trying Girls Out" was sampled.
The mixtape never saw an official commercial release. But, as Poindexter notes, West "willfully infringed the copyright for private and financial gain by selling and distributing an untold amount of physical and digital copies."
This suit, filed March 27, follows a recent case in which Kanye and Jay were taken to court by the soul singer Syl Johnson, over a sample from Watch the Throne track "The Joy".
Watch the video for Jay-Z's "Girls, Girls, Girls":

Only $500,000? I'm sure that it's only a chip off what is his huge fortune.
 
Hmmm, I'd really have to hear the two tracks to form an opinion. I think of all the samples and styles of music I listen to and how many of them wouldn't exist in their current forms if artists weren't ripping breakbeats or vocal samples from a less litigious era.

I'd like to see Kanye take a few more hits to his ridiculous Jesus complex, but I think I'd be more satisfied with a gay sex scandal or battering a hooker. Can't we all just share our music with the world and be happy? Y'know, in the name of creativity and all that bullshit or sumsuch?
 
What's a remix, then? And I think the entire Drum and Bass genre would disagree with you. Maybe you don't think that's a valid genre, I don't know.

Again, I haven't heard the music in question. I do think there are obvious cases where sampling is doing the work for you, and you may as well call it "theft". But if we're talking about a two-second stab or something similar, then we're making a fuss over nothing.
 
Using another person's music in your mixed tape isn't creativity.
Sampling does not lack creativity.

In other words: sampling was not seen as merely rehashing old sounds, but as an attempt to make new from something old—an artistic strategy as time-honored as creative expression itself.

But like Absinthe said, this varies in degree depending on how much and how unmodified the original source material was.

Money and fame really perverts the spirit of music. If money had nothing to do with this, then anyone who ripped off a sample in a really cheap way would be seen as a dick and that would be enough. But since people can rip off others work and make huge profit from it, we have to involve laws and it just gets ****ed.
 
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