Real Copyright Issues

Before I start, a disclaimer. I highly encourage you all to not go listen to the Will.I.Am songs in question unless you are listening to them from a source you know he won't make any money from. There is one video I have listed but it is listed because the video, and not just the audio is questionable, plus the video isn't on his youtube channel to begin with.

Musician Will.I.Am is caught in another controversy regarding him stealing music from another artist. Now, I understand that sometimes a song will sound similar to another song, and sometimes it may happen by pure chance, but in Will.I.Am's case this has happened multiple times, and for some of these songs, it's not just a similarity, it's a blatant rip off. Even far before Will.I.Am was doing his solo career, he was accused of musical plagiarism when he was a member of and "making" music for the Black Eyed Peas. In this first instance, I can't really catch it; having one word in common isn't anything really, though the artist, Pheonix Phenom claims the music was stolen as well. Do you hear it?

Later, the Black Eyed Peas were again accused by English breakbeat producer Adam Freeland for blatantly stealing his track 'Mancry' from the album Cope for use in the Black Eyed Peas track 'Party All the Time' from their album The E.N.D. A settlement was reached and BEP's lawyer(s) were quoted as having said,

     "The band reacted to an accusation of plagiarism, with Party All The Time said to have the beginning of Man Cry. They explained that this was not a case of plagiarism, in that the band’s manager had offered them a beat and it was a case of working together. “It was a lack of finalising legalities before releasing the record, clearance was not done and that was what it was about.”

But do you think that was actually the case, or do you think they just use that excuse after-the-fact? And how many artists out there are getting ripped off and never even realizing it?

And who could forget Will.I.Am's track 'I Got it From My Mama (Remix)' in which the song is easily recognizable as Daft Punk's 'Around the World' and the video is a mixture of Tron-esque imagery and very similar to the style of videos from the album Human After All, which 'Around the World' is from. To which I assume Daft Punk said something like "Look here, bitch, this shit isn't a remix and you're not worthy," and the video never made it to mainstream sources, but can still be found on youtube.

And the most recent case happened today, on the day Will.I.Am released his whole new album #WILLPOWER to youtube. As shown in this video, Will.I.Am's song 'Let's Go' ft. Chris Brown is so clearly 'Rebound' by Arty and Mat Zo that when you play it, the Shazzam application says so! I wonder if this will go to court, or if it will just be another case of "Oh we forgot" or "Oh it was released too early and things hadn't finished up." As of now, all we know is Arty tweeted "They never cleared rights through Anjunabeats, who's only one label, who ownes the rights for "Rebound"." and Anjunabeats tweeted "We are looking into the situation regarding Rebound, but can't reply to each message individually. Thanks for all your support." So we will just have to wait and see what becomes of this.