Ye Settles With Donna Summer’s Estate to End Copyright Lawsuit Over ‘Vultures 1’ Song

Ye (formerly Kanye West) has finalized a settlement with the estate of Donna Summer to resolve a copyright lawsuit that accused him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).”

In court filings on Thursday (June 20), attorneys for both sides said they had “entered into a settlement agreement that is a full and final settlement of all of the claims in the action” and that each side would pay its own legal bills from the dispute.

Following the filing of the settlement, Summer estate lead counsel Larry Stein told Billboard that the agreement did not include permission for Ye to use Summer’s material in the future. “We did not license the song,” said Stein. “As part of the settlement, they have agreed not to distribute or otherwise use the song. So we got what we wanted.”

Stein declined to comment on any other terms of the agreement, including whether Ye had paid a monetary settlement to account for infringement that already happened. Attorneys for Ye did not return a request for comment on the agreement.

The final settlement, first announced in court filings last month, comes less than four months after Summer’s estate sued the rapper for allegedly interpolating her track in “Good,” which he released on his chart-topping Vultures 1 album.

Making good on threats to sue issued publicly weeks earlier, the estate’s attorneys claimed at the time that the rapper had “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 Ye 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” his track as a “blatant rip-off.” The lawsuit also named album collaborator Ty Dolla $ign (Tyrone William Griffin Jr.) as a defendant.

Before the case was even filed, “Good” had been pulled from streaming platforms and removed from digital download versions of the album. As of Friday (June 21), the song is still not included on Vultures 1 on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music, though it’s available on YouTube from unofficial accounts.

Under the terms of the settlement, Ye’s song will remain out of circulation, according to Stein. That’s the outcome the estate was seeking in the February lawsuit, which argued that the legal action was not about simply asking for an ongoing royalty from the controversial rapper.

“This lawsuit is about more than defendants’ mere failure to pay the appropriate licensing fee for using another’s musical property,” the Summer estate wrote at the time. “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.”

Ye has been sued repeatedly for uncleared samples and interpolations in his music.

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.”

UPDATE: This story was updated on June 21 at 1:59 p.m. ET to add a claim from the attorney for Donna Summer’s estate that Ye is not allowed to distribute or otherwise use “Good (Don’t Die)” following the settlement.