American rapper T-Pain has been accused of plagiarism over his latest song, That’s Yo Money, a recurring violin melody in which is uncannily similar to the hit Hindi song Tum Hi Ho from Aashiqui 2.
The song has been pulled off T-Pain’s official YouTube channel after T-Series, which owns the rights to Tum Hi Ho, complained of copyright infringement, a Mumbai daily reported.
In a tweet during the weekend, T-Pain said he had not developed the tune and had got it from the song’s producer (Bishop Jones). The “labels will be in contact”, he said.
The controversy has also snowballed into a Twitter feud between T-Pain and some Indian Twitter users.
The rapper said that he was being trolled by “brown twitter” over his song and shared a racist and abusive post he had received from a Twitter user who claimed to be Indian.
That account has since been suspended.
The alleged plagiarism was spotted by social media users soon after T-Pain released his song on December 13.
Composer of the original song Mithoon then tweeted to T-Pain about it and said that “the [music] label is looking into this.”
Mithoon told Mumbai Mirror that T-Series was planning to take legal action.
Featuring Shraddha Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur in the film, ‘Tum Hi Ho’ was one of the biggest Bollywood hits of 2013.
The song had vocals by Arijit Singh, who would go on to become an iconic number in Hindi cinema soundtracks.
