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Business News Legal
Kanye West and Solange Knowles sued over sample
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 2 February 2018
A musician is suing both Kanye West and Solange Knowles, accusing them of ripping off his music for their own songs. Leroy Mitchell – aka Prince Phillip Mitchell – says that Knowles’s song ‘Fuck The Industry’ and West’s ‘Everything I Am’ both use samples from his 1970 song ‘If We Can’t Be Lovers’ without permission.
‘Fuck The Industry’ was released in 2010, but leaked online two years earlier. It was later added to a 2015 deluxe edition of Knowles’s 2008 album ‘Sol-Angel And The Hadley Street Dreams’. The main sample on which that song is built was lifted from ‘Everything I Am’, from West’s 2007 album ‘Graduation’.
Mitchell is listed as a co-writer on both tracks in the BMI database, although he is only now going legal. According to TMZ, he is seeking damages, as well as injunctions to block radio play and live performances of both allegedly infringing songs.