{"id":1453,"date":"2024-06-21T17:35:41","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T17:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ye-settles-donna-summer-copyright-lawsuit-over-vultures-1-song\/"},"modified":"2024-06-21T17:35:41","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T17:35:41","slug":"ye-settles-donna-summer-copyright-lawsuit-over-vultures-1-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/ye-settles-donna-summer-copyright-lawsuit-over-vultures-1-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Ye Settles Donna Summer Copyright Lawsuit Over \u2018Vultures 1\u2019\u00a0Song"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tYe<\/strong> (formerly Kanye West<\/a>) has finalized a settlement with the estate of Donna Summer<\/a> to resolve a copyright lawsuit that accused him of \u201cshamelessly\u201d using her 1977 hit \u201cI Feel Love\u201d without permission in his song \u201cGood (Don\u2019t Die).\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn court filings on Thursday, attorneys for both sides said they had \u201centered into a settlement agreement that is a full and final settlement of all of the claims in the action\u201d and that each side would pay its own legal bills from the dispute.<\/p>\n

\n\tFollowing the filing of the settlement, Summer estate lead counsel Larry Stein told Billboard <\/em>that the agreement did not include any permission for Ye to use Summer\u2019s material in the future. \u201cWe did not license the song,\u201d said Stein. \u201cAs part of the settlement, they have agreed not to distribute or otherwise use the song. So we got what we wanted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tStein declined to comment on any other terms of the agreement, including whether Ye had paid a monetary settlement. Attorneys for Ye did not return a request for comment on the agreement.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe final settlement, first announced in court filings last month, comes less than four months after Summer\u2019s estate sued the rapper for allegedly interpolating her track in \u201cGood,\u201d which he released on his chart-topping Vultures 1<\/em> album.<\/p>\n

\n\tMaking good on threats to sue issued publicly weeks earlier, the estate\u2019s attorneys claimed at the time that the rapper had \u201cshamelessly used instantly recognizable portions\u201d of her song in his track, despite the fact that her estate had already \u201cexplicitly denied\u201d him authorization to do so.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSummer\u2019s estate \u2026 wanted no association with West\u2019s controversial history and specifically rejected West\u2019s proposed use,\u201d her attorneys write. \u201cIn the face of this rejection, defendants arrogantly and unilaterally decided they would simply steal \u2018I Feel Love\u2019 and use it without permission.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Summer estate\u2019s lawyers say Ye re-recorded \u201calmost verbatim\u201d the key portions of her song and then used them as the hook for his own. The estate claims the songs were so similar that fans and critics \u201cinstantly recognized\u201d his track as a \u201cblatant rip-off.\u201d The lawsuit also named album collaborator Ty Dolla $ign (Tyrone William Griffin Jr.<\/strong>) as a defendant.<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore the case was even filed, \u201cGood\u201d had been pulled from streaming platforms and removed from digital download versions of the album. As of Friday, the song is still not included on Vultures 1<\/em> on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music, though it\u2019s available on YouTube from unofficial accounts.<\/p>\n

\n\tUnder the terms of the settlement, Ye\u2019s song will remain out of circulation, according to Stein. That\u2019s the outcome the estate was seeking in the February lawsuit, which argued that the legal action was not about simply asking for an ongoing royalty from the controversial rapper.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis lawsuit is about more than defendants\u2019 mere failure to pay the appropriate licensing fee for using another\u2019s musical property,\u201d the Summer estate wrote at the time. \u201cIt is also about the rights of artists to decide how their works are used and presented to the public, and the need to prevent anyone from simply stealing creative works when they cannot secure the right to use them legally.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYe has been sued repeatedly for uncleared samples and interpolations in his music.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2022, he was hit with a lawsuit claiming his song \u201cLife of the Party\u201d illegally sampled a song by the pioneering rap group Boogie Down Productions; accused in another case over allegations that he used an uncleared snippet of Marshall Jefferson\u2019s 1986 house track \u201cMove Your Body\u201d in the song \u201cFlowers\u201d; and sued in a different case by a Texas pastor for allegedly sampling from his recorded sermon in \u201cCome to Life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore that, West and Pusha T were sued in 2019 for sampling George Jackson\u2018s \u201cI Can\u2019t Do Without You\u201d on the track \u201cCome Back Baby.\u201d That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio snippet of a young girl praying in his 2016 song \u201cUltralight Beam.\u201d Further back, West was hit with similar cases over allegedly unlicensed samples used in \u201cNew Slaves,\u201d \u201cBound 2\u201d and \u201cMy Joy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ye (formerly Kanye West) has finalized a settlement with the estate of Donna Summer to resolve a copyright lawsuit that accused him of \u201cshamelessly\u201d using her 1977 hit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2085,429,2083,303,322,1773,2084],"class_list":["post-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-1song","tag-copyright","tag-donna","tag-lawsuit","tag-settles","tag-summer","tag-vultures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}