MUMBAI: Grammy Award-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar has been sued for illegally sampling a song by musician Bill Withers.
Mattie Music Group, a music company which says it owns the rights to Withers’ ‘Don’t you want to stay’, has filed a lawsuit against the rapper, claiming he sampled the veteran singer’s 1975 song without their permission on ‘I do this’ off his 2009 eponymous EP, reports tmz.com.
“The musical composition ‘I do this’ consists of nothing more than new, so-called rap or hip hop lyrics, set to the existing music of ‘Don’t you want to stay’,” Mattie Music Group argues in the documents they filed on Thursday and obtained by ew.com.
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“Rather, the music of ‘I do this’ is a direct and complete copy of the music of ‘Don’t you want to stay'”.
Lamar’s label Top Dawg Entertainment and its owner Warner Bros Music are named as defendants in the suit as well.
Plaintiffs are now seeking a temporary and final injunction on “I do this” plus an unspecified amount of damages.
This isn’t Lamar’s first time to have been sued over anything related to his music.
Prior to this, he was accused by a freelance photographer of stealing a photograph that was eventually used as a cover art of ‘The blacker the berry’, a single off his 2015 Grammy-winning album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’.
(Source:IANS)
