Kanye West Sued by Donna Summer Estate Over ‘Vultures 1’ Song

Bill Donahue
·5 min read
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The estate of Donna Summer filed a copyright lawsuit against Kanye West on Tuesday (Feb. 27), accusing him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).”

In a complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court, Summer’s estate made good on public allegations earlier this month that claimed West had infringed the copyright to her song by interpolating it in “Good,” which he released on his chart-topping Vultures 1 album.

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The estate’s attorneys say West “shamelessly used instantly recognizable portions” of her song in his track, despite the fact that her estate had already “explicitly denied” him authorization to do so.

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

The Summer estate’s lawyers say West re-recorded “almost verbatim” 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 “instantly recognized” Kanye’s track as a “blatant rip-off.” The lawsuit also named album collaborator Ty Dolla $ign, whose real name is Tyrone William Griffin Jr.

After the estate’s public statements earlier this month, “Good (Don’t Die)” was quickly pulled down from streaming platforms and has seemingly been removed from digital versions of the album. But the Summer estate says the damage is already done, and that legal action must be taken.

“This lawsuit is about more than Defendants’ mere failure to pay the appropriate licensing fee for using another’s musical property,” the estate’s lawyers write. “It 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.”

A rep for West did not immediately return a request for comment. Ty Dolla $ign could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to Tuesday’s complaint, a group called Alien Music reached out to the estate in January on behalf of West, seeking to clear the use of Summer’s song. The group advised the estate that West had already sampled “I Feel Love” on his own song, and was thus seeking “expedited” review so he could release it imminently.

In weighing the clearance request, the Summer estate says it considered the “immense commercial value” of allowing the use of her song, but also the risk of “potential degradation to Summer’s legacy” from working with the embattled rapper, who has faced widespread condemnation since a string of antisemitic statements in 2022.

“West is known as a controversial public figure whose conduct has led numerous brands and business partners to disassociate from him,” the estate writes. “The Summer Estate sought to protect the valuable intellectual property … from any public association with the negative publicity surrounding West.”

After that clearance request was “unambiguously denied,” the estate says it was then “shocked” when it heard “Good (Don’t Die),” in which it seemed that West had attempted to “get around this roadblock” by simply making an unauthorized interpolation of the underlying music rather than sampling the recording.

Re-recording “soundalike” versions of songs is a tactic that is sometimes used by artists when an outright sample is denied, but one that is only legally viable if they’ve already secured a license to the underlying composition. In the case of Summer’s song, her estate controls the rights to that music.

“When listening to both songs, any average listener can immediately hear the distinctive similar melody and compositional elements present in both songs, which sound so identical that it appears Defendants may have gone so far as sampling the original master recording of Summer,” the estate’s lawyers write.

Tuesday’s filings confirm what had already been publicly reported by Billboard: That the Summer estate had filed formal complaints with streaming platforms, distributors and retailers, including both Spotify and Apple Music, which succeeded in getting “Good (Don’t Die)” pulled down days after it was released.

But the estate says that unauthorized song was still streamed or downloaded millions of times and that some versions are still accessible on user-uploaded sites like YouTube. They say one version, of West playing the song at a live listening party, has “over 900,000 views and counting on YouTube alone.”

Such allegations are nothing new for West, who has been repeatedly sued for illegally sampling or interpolating in his tracks.

In 2022, he 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.”

Read the actual lawsuit filed against Kanye here:

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