IU plagiarism witchhunt happening right now: "It's worse than Tajinyo"

Since last year, there's been a dedicated and organized group spreading IU plagiarism accusations on Youtube and social media (you might've seen some of their videos because they got picked up by the algorithm). Some of the composers of the supposedly plagiarized songs even commented a few times saying there's no plagiarism but the antis would just delete those comments.

A few days ago, an anonymous person hired a law firm and submitted a police report accusing IU of plagiarism again - this anonymous person is unrelated to any composer or songwriter so while the case obviously won't go anywhere, all of the major media outlets have picked up the story and there's been significant media frenzy surrounding IU and plagiarism. People suspect the same group spreading the IU north korean spy rumors are related or behind the organized attack here as well.

Thankfully, many news articles now point out how the timing and nature of these accusations seem designed purely as a smear campaign against IU without any legal basis of actual copyright or care about the music. Still, the extent that these antis are going and their dedication to even hire a law firm remind many of Tajinyo and what happened to Tablo years ago.

A breakdown of some of the songs accused:

Composers of some of the accused songs speaking up.

UaenaTaglist

Quote from rubyjanes

This is bad but as an IU fan I'm not worried. It's pretty much a pattern that every few years (or every few months even) IU witch hunt for some ridiculous thing starts up again, but they never knock IU off her throne because IU is the final boss of kpop. They tried and failed like a decade ago to kill IU's career and she's stronger than ever at almost 30 years old. She's not going anywhere.

I agree, thankfully already a lot of music experts and composers are coming out to defend IU. The timing is also extremely suspicious (filing the accusation the week before her birthday) but I hope her agency is finally able to dole out some actual consequences instead of letting the antis fester like they usually do.

Quote from Siuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Crush/bbibbi is pretty obvious if you ask me. I noticed it the first moment I listened to Crush. The others are reaching.

Both of those songs use the same stylistic expression found in Ellie Goulding's "Burn" and other songs.

Quote from nevermindmejin

Poor IU, I hope this will pass soon.. Is it really worse than what Tablo experienced? Because it was pretty horrible and many Korean public was against him too.. I didn’t know IU’s case has escalated worse than that

The situation def isn't as bad as what Tablo experienced before - a music critic just called these people worse than Tajinyo because they're willing to expend significant amount of money (printing/distributing flyers, hiring a law firm) just for a smear campaign.

Quote from ISaidISaid

That’s not how copyrighting works. The original composers are not suing Crush. They will only see if artist 3 is copying artist 2. Unless artist 1 is suing artist 2 that doesn’t matter at all.

How legal procedures for copyright infringement works is that the accuser has to prove they have an unique expression that was copied - if the defendant can find songs that sound similar even before the accuser's song, then it's not considered unique. It's how JYP won the plagiarism case for "Someday" (judge ruled that while the 2 songs sounded similar, they both sounded similar to an even older song).