Three Kingdoms Issues Statement On Plagiarism Of EXO Lay’s “Lit” & Deletes Young Lex’s Music Video
After fans of EXO‘s Lay noticed striking similarities between the music video for “Lit” and a recently released music video by Indonesian rapper Young Lex, the company behind the video has issued a statement.
28-year-old Indonesian rapper and internet celebrity Young Lex, who has 3.37 million subscribers on YouTube, recently released a song and music video titled “Raja Terakhir (The Last King)”. The track was created to promote Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris, a new Indonesian mobile strategy game.
However, within hours of the music video’s release, K-Pop fans noticed that the “Raja Terakhir (The Last King)” music video appeared to plagiarize “Lit”, a music video released by EXO’s Lay Zhang (also known as Xhang Yixing) last year.
As soon as Lay’s fans were made aware of the similarities, they banded together on social media calling for Young Lex to take the video down and issue an apology to Lay himself. However, Young Lex did not seem receptive to concerns, commenting on YouTube, “K-Pop fans with MSG [stupid] brains will say this is plagiarism.”
Now, the company behind Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris has issued a statement about the controversy on Instagram. In their post, the Three Kingdoms team informed fans that they failed to do their due diligence on the material in the “Raja Terakhir (The Last King)”.
Regarding the dispute caused by the music video of Mr. Young Lex – “Raja Terakhir (The Last King)”, as the user of the song, we did not execute the material confirmation process that should have been done before we used the music video material.
— Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris team
Accepting full fault for the incident, they explained that the company has fired the team responsible for the content. They issued an apology to Lay, his team, and those behind the “Lit” music video.
It is our fault. We have conducted an internal review to this incident and fired the relevant team responsible for content supervision. For this, we express our deep apologies to Mr. Zhang Yixing and his team, and the copyright owner and producer of the music video. Hope to get your understanding.
— Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris team
Alongside issuing an apology, the Three Kingdoms team has also removed the music video from YouTube and other social media platforms and requested that all other copyright holders do the same. They went on to share that they will be setting up a special supervision team to prevent this issue from happening again.
After we found out about this incident, we immediately deleted the music video on all of our social media platforms and contacted the copyright owner to delete it in their channels. We will set up a special supervision team to strengthen the review of game promotion materials and pay more attention to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
— Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris team
As stated, the music video is no longer available on Young Lex’s channel, though it appears to have been set to Private rather than deleted. However, fans are still calling for an apology from Young Lex, both to Lay for the incident and to fans for his comments.
Lay Studio has reportedly been made aware of the issue but has not yet issued a statement. Read the Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris statement in full below.
Regarding the dispute caused by the music video of Mr. Young Lex – “Raja Terakhir (The Last King)”, as the user of the song, we did not execute the material confirmation process that should have been done before we used the music video material.
It is our fault. We have conducted an internal review to this incident and fired the relevant team responsible for content supervision. For this, we express our deep apologies to Mr. Zhang Yixing and his team, and the copyright owner and producer of the music video. Hope to get your understanding.
After we found out this incident, we immediately deleted the music video on all of our social media platforms and contacted the copyright owner to delete it in their channels. We will set up a special supervision team to strengthen the review of game promotion materials and pay more attention to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
Once again, we would like to apologize to Mr. Zhang Yixing and his team and wish Mr. Zhang Yixing all the best in the future.
— Three Kingdoms: Hero Legendaris team, Instagram
