ATEEZ Plagiarized Yet Again? Taiwanese Band Accused Of Copying The Entirety Of “Guerrilla”

Could ATEEZ be one of the most plagiarized K-Pop groups in the K-Pop industry? Some fans are beginning to think so, due to yet another instance of another artist releasing a song that sounds uncannily similar to one of the K-Pop group’s.

The most well-known case of an artist being accused of plagiarizing ATEEZ is when choreographer Vata allegedly copied the point dance of “Say My Name” while participating on Street Man Fighter. While he never admitted or apologized to the accusations, ATINYs pretty much unanimously agree that the dances are too similar to be coincidental.

anyways to those that didn’t know—the driving move in THAT smf new things challenge wasn’t made by vata, it was created FOR ATEEZ by the choreographer ANZE SKRUBE and his team to use in their TT Say My Name released in 2019 pic.twitter.com/tbeLBZjie2

— ecks (@lattejjong) October 9, 2022

Earlier in 2022, ATEEZ’s song “Wave” was sampled without permission by (G)I-DLE‘s Soyeon for My Teenage Girl‘s finale song.

I love Soyeon and the girls (my teenage girls) , they are soo talented which I cannot disagree that but…. this sounds sooo same.. mybe intentionally or unintentionally. I need some explanation plis. SUN x WAVE #ATEEZDESERVESBETTER #ATEEZ #MyTeenageGirl #SUN #WAVE pic.twitter.com/HRu9fXrttk

— 보라님 (@Atinyyyy5) February 28, 2022

Around the same time, Nigerian singer Eltee Skhillz also released a music video that quite clearly copied the scenes and aesthetics from ATEEZ’s “The Real”.

Please report this song to kq. The name of music video is “Odg” by Eltee Skhillz. Dont watch the mv. Ateez getting plagarised left and right damn. @kqent pls do something about this. It’s worse then what jyp did with nmixx. This is blatant… pic.twitter.com/kqKEGC7BZF

— Chiyo misses Siyeon (@dimpledsatan) March 19, 2022

Even their album covers and concept photos have been copied by other artists.

Knetz shares mixed reaction as ATEEZ album cover was getting plagiarism by MONOPOLY. https://t.co/Rt21AvZcab pic.twitter.com/4tEbpE5AYq

— Story Kpop (@k_popstory) September 28, 2020

In the newest plagiarism accusation, Chinese band 3WICH recently released a song called “Kicking Your Face”, and pretty much right from the start of the song, the similarities to ATEEZ’s “Guerrilla” seem to begin.

If you listened to the song on its own without making the connection right away to “Guerrilla”, though, you might not think they sound close enough to be caught up in a plagiarism accusation. But comparison videos have been shared online that show how similar the structure and sound of “Kicking Your Face” is to “Guerrilla”, and it becomes hard to deny that the former seems to be a copy of the latter.

Pretty much everyone in the comments section agrees that “Guerrilla” is being plagiarized, and while many aren’t surprised that ATEEZ has allegedly been copied once again, it’s still disappointing.

A Reddit post was made about the subject as well, and the comments on there are very similar to those on the YouTube video.

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It’s hard to believe that someone could yet again be copying something so blatantly from ATEEZ after all the times they’ve had this happen before.

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3WICH and their composer ended up doing a livestream addressing the plagiarism accusations, which they denied. However, Music Maker, the program that “Kicking Your Face” was performed on, has decided to remove the song from all platforms due to the controversy until the copyright issue is solved.

They kept emphasising on the differences between the songs, the composer started to demonstrate his abilities in producing, saying he does not need to plagiarise and is able to compose. They feel that the accusation of plagiarism towards them is serious and has legal implications

— za (@zhouang) October 2, 2023

Music Maker (the program where the song was performed on) released a statement that due to the controversy surrounding the contestant 3WICH’s competition song “Kicking your face”, the work will be removed from all platforms until the relevant music copyright issues are clarified. pic.twitter.com/lGP3nxXI9H

— za (@zhouang) October 2, 2023

We can only hope that ATEEZ and their production team don’t continue to have to deal with instances of their work being plagiarized in the future.