A dozen music artists are facing charges of copyright infringement. The record label which filed the suit, Twilight Records and Syl-Zel Music, claims that the artists in question sampled their song “different strokes”, without their prior permission or consent. The song was initially sung by Sylvester Thompson (aka Syl Johnson) in 1967.
The suit involves some big name music artists including Usher, Mark Wahlberg, and Run DMC. It also includes two large record companies, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, for contributory copyright infringement. If the suit is successful, this will not be the first time a big named artist has illegally sampled “different strokes”. The song was alleged to have been improperly sampled in Kanye West and Jay-Z’s 2011 article Watch the Throne; the suit was eventually settled out of court of an undisclosed amount of money.
I’ll keep this blog updated as the suit continues. This is the fourth time since I’ve started updating this blog in May that artists have been alleged to have infringed copyright in one way or another. Who knows if these disputes will be successful, but at the very least the fact that current songs are close enough to songs from the past for people to question their originality hints that there is a slight dip in originality.
Source:
http://music.msn.com/music/article.aspx?news=830454
