Ye Faces Another Copyright Lawsuit Over Sampling: ‘Blatant Theft of Musical Property’

Ye (formerly Kanye West) is facing another lawsuit accusing him of illegal sampling, this time over allegations that he incorporated an instrumental track into two songs from Donda even after he was explicitly denied permission.

The case, filed Wednesday (July 17) in Los Angeles federal court, claims that Ye borrowed elements from a song called “MSD PT2” for his own “Hurricane” and “Moon” — both of which reached the top 20 on the Hot 100 when they were released in 2021.

Filed by a company that owns the rights to the earlier song, the case claims that when Ye was refused a license to use it, he simply “decided to steal it.”

“This lawsuit is about more than defendants’ failure to pay a fee,” writes Oren Warshavsky and other attorneys from the law firm BakerHostetler, representing the plaintiffs. “It is about the rights of artists, musicians, and songwriters to determine how their works are published and used. Intellectual property owners have a right to decide how their property is exploited and need to be able to prevent shameless infringers from simply stealing.”

In an act of particularly “blatant brazenness,” the lawsuit claims that Ye even credited the song’s four creators — Khalil Abdul-Rahman Hazzard, Sam Barsh, Dan Seeff and Josh Mease — as songwriters despite their refusal to work with him.

Wednesday’s case was filed not by the artists themselves, but by a company called Artist Revenue Advocates (ARA), which owns the copyrights to “MSD PT2.” Lawyers for the company say the four artists turned to ARA after they “unsuccessfully attempted to collect their share of the proceeds from these songs” for nearly three years.

A spokesperson for Ye could not immediately be located for comment on the new case.

The new allegations come less than a month after Ye settled a separate lawsuit filed by the estate of Donna Summer over a very similar accusation. In that earlier case, Summer’s estate claimed the rapper had used her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” in his own “Good (Don’t Die)” despite a similarly explicit refusal.

“Summer’s estate … wanted no association with West’s controversial history and specifically rejected West’s proposed use,” the estate’s attorneys wrote at the time. “In the face of this rejection, defendants arrogantly and unilaterally decided they would simply steal ‘I Feel Love’ and use it without permission.”   

Even before the two recent cases, Ye has been sued repeatedly for uncleared samples and interpolations in his music.

In 2022, Ye was hit with a lawsuit claiming his song “Life of the Party” 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’s 1986 house track “Move Your Body” in the song “Flowers”; and sued in a different case by a Texas pastor for allegedly sampling from his recorded sermon in “Come to Life.”

Before that, West and Pusha T were sued in 2019 for sampling George Jackson‘s “I Can’t Do Without You” on the track “Come Back Baby.” That same year, he was sued for allegedly using an audio snippet of a young girl praying in his 2016 song “Ultralight Beam.” Further back, West was hit with similar cases over allegedly unlicensed samples used in “New Slaves,” “Bound 2” and “My Joy.”