Kanye West vs. EMI: What You Need to Know About the Contentious Lawsuit

Image via Getty/Prince Williams

As we speculated last month, Kanye is claiming that he is stuck in an unfair and illegal publishing deal. He is saying, essentially, that his publishing deal with EMI should have expired in October, 2010, seven years after he signed it—and weeks before he released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The seven year limit on contracts is a fairly common argument among musicians and bands, though it’s usually applied to record deals, not publishing. The number seven comes from a nineteenth-century California law about the length of personal services contracts. Seven years means exactly that—seven calendar years, no matter what, except for recording artists. Everyone from Courtney Love to Jared Leto to Rita Ora has chafed at this exception, but as of now, it remains in effect.

Kanye has a list of six largely overlapping demands that boil down to two main things: ownership and money.

First, he wants the ownership EMI has over all his songs after October 1, 2010. According to the terms of his original 2003 contract, that’s 50% of his stake in each song.

Second, he wants the last four years’ worth of money that EMI made from the post-October 2010 portion of his catalog. Kanye also wants EMI to pay for his lawyers, who in past cases have each had an average rate of over $1,000 per hour—and he’s got four of them on the case. (Side note: Kanye’s lawyers provide a nice capsule bio for West in their suit. It’s great except for its one mention of “Kayne West” and a note about “Rock-A-Fella Records.”)

Kanye is complaining that his 2003 contract was extended numerous times over the years, increasing the amount of songs he owes EMI and making the term of the deal essentially indefinite, since he can’t keep up with the ever-increasing demands. The original contract required him to write at least three “Full New Compositions” a year, a number that went up to six in one of the renewals.

But that term is a little tricky. If Kanye is credited with only writing a fraction of the song (and we all know how ‘Ye loves to collaborate), then he only gets that much credit towards a new composition. And currently, three of the six songs have to either appear on a solo album or be recorded by an artist whose previous album sold at least 600,000 copies. “As a practical matter,” his lawyers write, “this pressured Mr. West to increase his pace of recording his own studio albums.”

In EMI’s filing, a hellishly long and frequently redundant 383-page monster, the company doesn’t answer Kanye’s claims point-by-point. Instead, they’re trying a different gambit. They want to move the case to federal court. This would disarm Yeezy’s primary argument—which, remember, involves a California law, not a federal one.

Their argument for the move is multi-faceted, but the main thrust of it is fairly simple. EMI insists that the lawsuit is not about a contract they made with Kanye as a songwriter (a “personal services” contract in CA legal parlance). Instead, it’s about who owns the copyrights to the songs in question. And copyright law is a matter for the feds, not the states. In addition, EMI points out (and provides some documentation to prove) that Kanye signed “modifications” of his contract seven separate times. It’s left unstated but obvious: If the deal was so bad, they imply, why did you keep renewing it? Kanye’s point of view is that the way the modifications were applied, there was “no break in the services”—a key point if the case stays in California. The whole point of having contracts last only seven years is to give the person under contract a chance look around and consider other options. West, his lawyers seem to be saying, never had that choice.

Another reason the case belongs in federal court, EMI claims, is because they are based in Connecticut and New York (they are a Connecticut corporation technically, but doing business in New York, and thus citizens of both, for legal purposes). As West is in California (remember, a California law is the entire basis for his lawsuit), EMI argues, this means the case has what is called "diversity of citizenship," which is one of the qualifications for moving a case out of state court and into the federal system.

When Kanye’s lawsuit was first made public, a key part that everyone (including us) picked up on was its unusual claim that EMI had effectively banned the rap icon from retiring. (“At no time during the Term will you seek to retire as a songwriter, recording artist or producer or take any extended hiatus”). This now-famous clause, quoted in the suit, is from the 2006 contract modification, which is not included in EMI’s filing (though later modifications are). Notably, EMI does not dispute, or even address, the retirement issue in their filing. So it appears that several years into Kanye’s career, his publisher added language that said he had to keep on “pursuing Your musical career in the same basic manner as You have pursued such career to date” in order to make sure he would continue writing songs, and thus fulfill the terms of his contract.