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Somewhere, there is a laptop. It belongs to Kanye West. It probably has a lot of his songs on it. That much is true, or at least highly plausible.

But who possesses that laptop — along with whatever music might be on it — became the Internet rumor du jour early Wednesday. It began when Malik Yusef, a spoken-word artist signed to Mr. West’s label, claimed on Twitter that private investigators were looking into a theft of said computer, in Paris, where Mr. West has been spotted recently for Fashion Week. Around the same time a new track by Mr. West, “Awesome,” was leaked online.

By the web’s logic, that quickly developed into an alarming story, which took shape on the online message board Reddit and quickly ricocheted through the news media: Kanye West’s laptop was stolen and all his music will be leaked! An anonymous Twitter user, using the handle @kanyelaptop, claimed to have Mr. West’s computer and made the ambiguous threat: “At 100k I will leak a song entilted YZ 2.0.”

Against the recent backdrop of major leaks of music by Madonna, Björk and others that caused record companies to act fast, the story also suggested a potential marketing crisis for one of pop’s music biggest and most revered stars. It was the kind of story that, for bored Twitter users and major news outlets alike, is too delicious to resist.

But was it true? Gabriel Tesoriero, executive vice president at Mr. West’s label, Def Jam, who has been a spokesman for Mr. West for years, quickly denied the rumor, or at least most of it. “The stories circulating that Kanye West’s laptop has been stolen are completely false,” he said in a statement. “His laptop has never been out of his possession. Hence, the laptop has not been hacked, and there has been no leak of personal data such as unreleased music, photographs, designs, videos or any other personal files. The leak today of the unreleased track ‘Awesome’ was unrelated and completely coincidental.”

For a few hours, anyway, it was a good story.