Following the $7.3 million verdict in the "Blurred Lines" suit, RZA has stepped up to call for limitations on how much an artist or their estate can recover in cases where songs were sampled without consent. Speaking on the issue at SXSW (where he served as a keynote speaker), the Wu-Tang Clan founder noted that artists providing source material or inspiration should be compensated but that there should be a limit on how much money they are able to receive. According to a report from the Daily Beast, RZA feels that this number should top out somewhere around the 50 percent mark:
“Art is something that’s made to inspire the future. If you utilize somebody’s artistic expression blatantly, to [the point] where it’s an identifiable thing, then there should be some sort of compensation to the person who inspires you,” “Even though I use his portion as an instrument—because the sampler is an instrument—he should not be able to come in and take 100 percent of my song. The most he should get is 50 percent. There should be a cut off. Fifty percent is the most.”
Continuing, RZA noted:
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve sampled something and the original copyright holder took 90 percent,” he said. “That means they ignored all the programming, drumming, keyboard playing I played on top of it, they ignored every lyric, every hook, everything that we built to make it a song. And we wound up selling more copies than the sample version—but yet they took 90 percent of the song.”
RZA's call for payment limitations and strict protections in favor of artists follows Pharrell's warning that the verdict could negatively affect artists and producers across the industry.
