RZA Fires Back Against Accuser of Copyright Infringement

Another day, another copyright infringement, but RZA isn’t taking this one lightly as he is firing back against JVC Kenwood Holdings – the parent company of Teichiku Entertainment, a rights management company. The original claim was that the Wu-Tang Clan member illegally sampled Meiko Kaji’s “Gincyo Watadori” on Kanye West‘s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album. The label has since refused to pay royalties, claiming that RZA created an original piano run, unlike the accused on Kaji’s track. RZA’s attorney, Howard King, has presented this counter argument:

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 ‘Gincyo Watadori,’ and the piano run in ‘Gincyo’ is so simple that the least talented person in the studio could have replayed it had anyone wished to do so.