Photo by Erez Avissar
RZA is fighting back against a company that has accused him of copyright infringement with a lawsuit of his own. Billboard reports that he's suing JVC Kenwood Holdings, which owns a musical rights acquisition company called Teichiku Entertainment.
It's a little complicated, so bear with us here: Teichiku Entertainment originally claimed that RZA wrongfully used a brief piano sample from "Gincho Watadori," performed by Meiko Kaji, on Kanye West's track "Dark Fantasy" from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which RZA produced. According to RZA, due to the claim, Def Jam withheld $50,000 of RZA's royalty money. RZA now claims that the original copyright allegations were bogus, and is turning the tables by suing JVC Kenwood/Teichiku.
RZA's lawyer Howard King tells The Hollywood Reporter:
We see dozens of baseless copyright-infringement claims against our clients every year. Rather than engaging in costly and fruitless dialogue trying to convince claimants and their contingency lawyers that our clients do not succumb to extortion and settle ridiculous claims, we have decided to commence declaratory relief actions to squash some of these claims and, perhaps, recover our costs of defending same. The RZA complaint is the second one of these we have filed this month, with more to come.
He added, "RZA did not use Teichiku's piano run, and it sounds different from the one in 'Dark Fantasy'. In fact, it would have been technologically impossible to sample the piano run without the rest of the music in 'Gincho Watadori,' and the piano run in 'Gincho' is so simple that the least talented person in the studio could have replayed it had anyone wished to do so."
Watch a recent Pitchfork.tv interview with RZA: