A Texas pastor has named Kanye ‘Ye’ West in a lawsuit over the song Come To Life from the album Donda.
After reviewing legal documents in the matter, TMZ reported Tuesday that Bishop David Paul Moten stated the 44-year-old rapper unauthorizedly exploited a 70-second excerpt of a sermon he gave.
According to legal papers, Moten’s voice and sermon are used continuously throughout the song from the beginning to the end, accounting for more than 20% of the track.
In the suit, Moten also named UMG Recordings, Def Jam Recordings, and G.O.O.D Music.
According to Moten, the Grammy-winning musician and his companies have been ‘willfully and egregiously sampling sound recordings of others without agreement or license’ over the past many years.
According to Variety, the petition comes after Universal Music Group was named in an action filed in the United Kingdom High Court in March over West’s 2010 song Power, which used samples from King Crimson’s 1969 song 21st Century Schizoid Man.
Declan Colgan Music Ltd (DCM), the firm that owns the rights to the sampled music, claimed in legal documents that UMG was not paying its due portion of royalties from streaming of West’s single, which appeared on his 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.