The Weeknd Sued For Allegedly Ripping Off ‘The Hills’

The Weeknd and his team have been sued by a British music publishing company that claims that he plagiarized the musical composition for his hit "The Hills" from "Revolution", composed by Tom Raybould for the 2013 motion picture The Machine.

A suit was filed Wednesday in U.S. district Court in Los Angeles by Cutting Edge Music (Holding) Limited alleging that the Weeknd "copyrighted musical composition of an original song, titled ‘Revolution' on the soundtrack album and ‘Revolution Sequence' on the cue sheet, from the score for the motion picture entitled The Machine."

The documents continue, "With full knowledge of CEMH's copyright in the Track, and without CEMH's permission, Defendants blatantly copied a unique and significant portion of the Track and included it in a high profile and widely distributed single and album, thereby infringing on the copyrights exclusively licensed by CEMH."

"Specifically, both the Infringing Song and the Track featuring synthesizer bass-lines performed with almost identical idiosyncratic sounds at the same register and using the same pitch sequence, melodic phase structure and rhythmic durations," states the suit.

The suit also further alleges that Emmanuel "Million Dollar Mano" Nickerson and Carlo "Illangelo" Montagnese sent a tweet on March 9, 2015 to Raybould which stated, "I sampled your music might make it 2 the weeknd next album. Huge fan of what u did 4 the machine movie!" "The Hills" was released several months later.