Bluesmen weren’t making a million bucks, either. (Let alone Katy Perry money) Borrowing/sharing standard structures was no big deal. Try to make a bunch of money off of someone else’s stuff, a la Led Zeppelin, and find yourself sued.
By the way, there is a “melody” in the song Joyful Noise. In the last part of the song there’s a terrible nu-metal band doing a few verses.
It’s just not the part that was reused, because who would want to do that?
There are a heck of a lot more similarities than that, Go_Arachnid_Laser. Like, in both songs, all of the frequencies used are some power of the 12th root of 2, times 440 Hz. Out of all of the uncountably large number of possible frequencies, what are the chances that they’d both just happen to choose those? And both songs produce those frequencies through the vibrations of human vocal cords. All of the possible ways to produce sound frequencies, and they just happen to choose the same method?
So what you’re saying is that you do believe it’s a coincidence?
I should have just called them thieves. Is that better?
Oh, I should have used the word “offense”.
Feel better now?
Part of it is coincidence, and part of it is both songs working from the same structure of artistic conventions that nearly all songs in the Western world work from.
Adam Neely has posted a video (a good channel for music theory): Why the Katy Perry/Flame lawsuit makes no sense - YouTube
And in that video, very early on, there are multiple works with snippets that are just as similar.
And again the lyricists were found liable. And others who would have had nothing to do with the riff. They literally couldn’t have copied it, as they had nothing to do with it.
Thee are just opportunistic lawyers taking advantage of the fact that jurors cannot be experts on the subject matter. No evidence of actual copying was presented: it was inferred by taking advantage of the jury’s lack of musical knowledge.
Horrible case, and it shouldn’t matter if it was against someone you don’t like. I’m not defending Dr. Luke, but the ability to write music. The copyright system is bad enough as is for music.
Yes.
And note that my stuff about the jurors was said before watching the part at the end, where Adam instead goes after the Musicologist who made some very obviously false claims.
Right. So if you, for instance, made a song, and some rapper or EDM Dj took a riff from it and made another song with it, without giving you any credit, let alone any part of the royalties, you would be fine with that.
I found that part actually intellectually dishonest. The musicologist wasn’t claiming that Flame invented anything new: he was claiming that there were similarities between the two songs.
Sasmpling is theft; this was settled in the late '80s/early '90s. In most cases that are settled, the thief does have to credit the person they stole from, as well as pay them for the use of their work. This lawsuit ensures that both of those things will happen for this Katy Perry song as none of the people involved, or the giant mega-corporation that owns them all, was going to do it on their own.
That’s a terrible metric to use to determine whether or not something is okay; would you like a list of things that were or have been going on for hundreds or thousands of years that are objectionable today?
It’s interesting that you say “took a riff.” I would think that almost all songwriters and musicians would agree that a riff is a basic unit of music, and particularly certain genres of music, and no one that claim ownership of a riff.
Riffs are part of the building blocks of music. No one should be mad about someone else using a riff, any more than someone should be mad that another song also uses a major scale.
:eek:
That’s crazy talk. You think you could play the main riff from, say, Smoke On The Water over and over in your song and not have everyone call you a thief?
Go dig up Greg Ham and ask him about that kind of thing.
Actually, when I read this again, I’m wondering if you are talking about sampling a recording rather than taking a riff from a song.
To be clear here, when we talk about music copyrights, there are two separate protected works–an underlying composition, which is called the “musical work,” and a recording of a particular performance of a musical work, which is called a “sound recording.”
This case was about infringing a musical work, a composition, not sampling a sound recording. Those are two different things.
Sampling a recording is infringing–it’s a much easier case. Someone else’s recording is not one of the basic building blocks of music. You can use a riff–just play it on your own instrument with your own hands. You can’t swipe a piece of someone else’s recording.
Is it really?
Yes, some riffs are quite recognizable. Perhaps you might recognize the riff from ZZ Top’s “La Grange.” Do you think it would be crazy for someone else to use that riff?
How about If I told you that ZZ Top didn’t come up with that riff? It goes back at least as far as John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun.”
It’s been used in dozens and dozens of songs-- Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing,” Goldfrapp’s “Ooh La La,” and on and on.
It would be crazy talk to take such a basic figure of music and give ownership to a single person.
I’m not a scholar of music, but I would expect that a musicologist could come up with more than one song that used the “Smoke on the Water” riff.
Oh, riffs are usually short, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be complex and unique combinations of a lot of notes.
Let me put it another way. A while back Portugal the Man had a fairly big hit with Feel it Still.
The chorus uses a variation of a fragment from 1961’s Please, Mister Postman, by The Marvelettes. About ten notes.
Gourley did that on purpose because he liked the way it sounded. So he did “the right thing”, told the record company to obtain the permissions and now the five writers of Please Mr. Postman are credited as co/writers of Feel It Still.
And I’m fine with that. I don’t see why they shouldn’t.
Except they aren’t that different, really.
Since the concept of the DJ as a creator in the late eighties, a lot of modern music is made of samples from other songs. Daft Punk, for instance, make their songs by sampling from old funk records. Sure, they lose some money to royalties, but that’s what they like to do. Right? You use a sample from a record, you pay for it and that’s that.
But then, there’s the DJ’s who think, ‘Hey, why don’t I recreate this sample in the studio with some minor variations? That way I don’t have to give credit or pay squat.’ And then it’s not that simple.
You’re not saying much here. Sampling a recording is infringing. Period. easy case.
Taking elements from a song without sampling is a musical work infringement case. You have to figure out what exactly is the protected work. It’s the same as any other musical work case.