Insert Gold Digger joke here.

Lorenzo Pryor and Trena Steward are the legal owners of Thunder & Lightning’s ‘Blazin’ Bus Stop’, and last week launched legal proceedings against a host of rap industry heavyweights (and a few independent bystanders). The brother and sister inherited the rights from their father David Pryor, and claim they’re owed millions of dollars from continued usage of the track over the last fifteen years.

Kanye West is possibly the most prominent of those named, as he sampled ‘Blazin’ Bus Stop’ in 2005’s ‘Gold Digger’, but he was hardly the first rap producer to grab the familiar sounds. Gang Starr’s DJ Premiere flipped the track’s bass line on stone-cold classic ‘DWYCK’, as did 3rd Bass along with a very young MF Doom (under his Zev Love X moniker) on their stand-out ‘The Gas Face’. Californian weirdo Madlib opted for the drums on Madvillain’s ‘ALL CAPS’, and was joined by Lord Finesse on ‘Save That Shit’ and super-producer Timbaland when he put together Missy Elliot’s ‘Play That Beat’. West is technically only a minor offender only using a tiny snippet of vocals (“Get down”), but he still managed to be the only producer named explicitly in the court documents, no doubt due to the fact that he’s, well, very rich and famous. It wouldn’t have made much as much sense to get Kool Keith involved now would it?

The companies named are Stones Throw (who seem to be having a rough ride of it lately), Roc-A-Fella, Bad Boy, Island Def Jam, Caroline Distribution, Bomb Hip Hop, and games publishers Activision (assumedly for usage of People Under The Stairs’ ‘The Next Step II’ in Tony Hawk’s Underground) and Autumn (who may have multiple violations with Def Jam Rapstar), and are accused of copyright infringement and “criminal enterprise”.

We’re not really sure how much of this was likely even known by the labels themselves, but it’s certain the track has been sampled a great deal and it’s hard to tell how the ‘fair use’ defense will actually hold up in light of the accusations. [via AllHipHop]