Veteran highlife singer, Victor Uwaifo, has said that he has slammed celebrated singer, Simi, with a N50m suit.
He said he asked his solicitor to do this because Simi allegedly remixed his popular song, ‘Joromi’, without any permission from him.
While Uwaifo, who is also a visual artist, scholar and a former commissioner for culture in Edo State, released ‘Joromi’ in 1959, Simi released her own ‘version’ in 2017.
The older musician had first threatened a fight over the matter last year during a programme held in Lagos.
Speaking in an interview on NTA yesterday (Wednesday), Uwaifo said he decided to sue Simi to teach her and other people a lesson that copyright infringement was a serious offence.
Also in an interview with ‘SaharaReporters’ last year, he had said,
“Copyright is a very serious business and the contravention of copyright laws is more serious than you can imagine.Most people still believe that someone can just pick somebody’s work, which we call intellectual property right, and use it for his own benefit of the detriment of the composer, the man who actually created the work. You know it takes time to create a work; it takes a lot of research to be able to come out with a piece of work.
“You know one single track is equivalent to research journal and then a whole record is equivalent to a book publication, so people don’t understand it they don’t know. You don’t just wake up in the university then you just put anything down and you call it a journal or a book. It takes a lot of research to be able to do one piece of music. The composition, the lyrics, the music, the score, the arrangement, the production and booking of the studio all cost money, and someone will just come and take the work and use it as his own or probably do an advert on it.”
