Artiste manager and media personality Sammy Flex has weighed in on the ongoing copyright controversy involving rapper Medikal and Ghanaian group Alabaster Box.
According to him, the situation appears to be an unfortunate oversight on the part of Medikal’s team, including the producer who worked on the song.
Medikal recently released a track titled Welcome to Africa, which has landed him in legal trouble with Alabaster Box. The group accuses him of unlawfully sampling their hit song Akwaaba without permission.
Speaking on Joy Prime TV, Sammy Flex expressed his belief that Medikal and his management did not deliberately use the original material with malicious intent.
“I can tell you Team Medikal had no idea of what was going to happen because that was so clear, that was so vivid, and you could not skip it,” he said.
He emphasised that the issue could have been avoided had Medikal’s management team, including the producer, exercised more diligence during the production process.
“If they knew, including the producer who worked on the song, they wouldn’t have done that. The producer should have known better. To them, they thought they were not taking the original song of Alabaster Box; they believed they were creating their own thing,” he explained.
Sammy Flex believes the situation was not born out of disregard for intellectual property, but rather a lack of awareness about the implications of sampling someone else’s music.
“I am so sure they were not aware of the implications, that’s the reason they have fallen into that trap at the moment,” he added.
AK/MA
