AU Band Men At Work Owes Royalties On 'Kookaburra' 371
neonsignal writes "Iconic Australian band Men at Work have been ordered to pay royalties for an instrumental riff in their song 'Down Under.' The notes were sampled from a well-known children's song 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,' written in 1934 for a Girl Guide's Jamboree. The Justice found the claims of the copyright owner Larrikin to be excessive, but ordered the payment of royalties and a percentage of future profits. Let's hope the primary schools are up to date with their ARIA license fees!"
1934 (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck, is the guy who wrote this even still alive?
Oh right, copyright law is written for zombies.
Nine billion names of God (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't all you "Pirates" come together and write a computer program to generate all possible melodies for the 32 bar AABA, form. Then publish the whole lot under the creative commons license or whatever, call western music complete, and then download in peace.
Also these lawsuits are always bunk. Noone ever sues over the harmony do they?
Perversion of the law's intent (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps copyright needs to be more like trademarks (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps copyright needs a similar exception. If your song/phrase/work becomes an iconic symbol of something else (in this case, Australia), then clearly the benefit to society of not having it protected by copyright outweighs the author's right to profit off it. So it should lose its copyright.
Re:Nine billion names of God (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice try RIAA. You're telling gullible nerds to generate all possible melodies and publish them, only to come in and sue them for the melodies which are already copyrighted.
remember the reason for copyright (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly this is encouraging more works to be created.
To be honest I would love to see at least one example of an author who created a culturally significant work pre-1950 who has created another meaningful work in the last 10 years.
Re:1934 (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately "artists" provide their own reasons for us to want them dead.. often: nagging about copyright.
Re:1934 (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone made a point that I think made sense......if we're going to have copyright, we ought to not make it based on the life of the creator.....otherwise it will be motivation to kill artists. Make it 15 years from the time it was created or something.
I know this is modded funny, but seriously say you are write a song that sounds like something else [vwh.net] and the judge rules that you might have subconsciously copied it. You have a potential bill for millions that will go away if this artist dies....
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:3, Insightful)
We can primarily thank Disney for that
Owned by Warner Music Group now though (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange the Larrikin Wikimedia page [wikimedia.org] does not mention it, but it is now a Warner Music Group [wikimedia.org] holding (bought by Festival Records, swallowed by Warner Music Australasia).
The *IAA's successfully bought off the Aussie politicians [google.com] in full public view, it is only natural that they get to recuperate that "investment" in Aussie law changes. Bad thing for Australia is: The carrot they offered in return has turned out to be a dud [wikimedia.org] - those silly Aussie politicians sold out for little more than shiny trinkets of no value.
Re:1934 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I've never seen anything justifying such a separation. Old Walt could be pretty ruthless, too.
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, no. My children do not have any right to continue to earn money from my work, nor do the executors of my estate or any other 3rd party who might be in my will.
The absolute maximum that copyright should ever be is the life of the author, though frankly that's far too much as it is. I don't get to write one program and then sit back and earn royalties off it every time someone runs it, I have to keep writing new ones to make a living just like almost every other industry anywhere, so why the hell should musicians get to write one song and then live off it for the rest of their lives?
Re:The song (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point though I suppose most people thought "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree" was written so long ago that a claim was unlikely. I certainly thought so.
Re:1934 (Score:3, Insightful)
This "subconcious copy" thing is why I do not want to learn how to create music. It is too risky in today's climate. If I create some music which sounds somewhat like another piece of music someone else had created before, even if I had never heard it, I could be sued and lose a lot of money.
And people still say copyright is supposed to encourage creativity...
Re:Even If They Lose the Appeal... (Score:1, Insightful)
So I if someone kick you in the teeth you will see that as a win since they could have shot you instead?
Seriously, this is based on a similarity so vague that no one noticed it for more than twenty years! After hearing the "original" I've realised that this is not just a loss for the band, it could easily set precedence to be a serious problem for all aussie songwriters. After all, I know of lots of famous songs which is at least as similar to each other as these two are
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:3, Insightful)
Well it's not that easy, I think. Someone like Christopher Reuel Tolkien (age 85) is still publishing - at that age you are more likely to be interested in earning money for your family or descendents rather than yourself.
But why should certain professions even have this ability to generate ongoing income for their descendants? Joe Taxi-driver can only invest the money he makes during his lifetime to provide ongoing income. Other artists such as painters and sculptors don't get ongoing income from their work. Why should some authors and entertainers be treated differently?
Re:1934 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:flute riff (Score:4, Insightful)
That's it? Ten notes, four tones, not even played in the same mode?
Re:Copyright For Life Of The Creator Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying the system is perfect, but just because a piece of property was created in someone's mind doesn't have to mean that the property suddenly belongs to the planet after an arbitrary time period.
If I owned the copyright to Homer, the Greek, Roman, and Norse tales, and Shakespeare, then I could prevent any new work of narrative from ever being created and sold.
Re:The song (Score:5, Insightful)
Never knew that such a surreal song had such a literal music video. Oh, well.
They're referencing Kookaburra all right (the flautist actually sits in an old gum tree), but they are not "sampling" it as half the notices about this says. They are also playing it in a minor key, while it's in a major key in the original.
It's also an 80 years old children's song. With four tones, eleven notes in the disputed part. The world is mad.
Re:Copyright For Life Of The Creator Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
>Whether we like it or not Disney and Paramount and NBC make some decent products.
To answer your question: Disney made the vast majority of it's fortune by borrowing FROM the public domain. The scripts for nearly all their best selling movies were based on older stories on which the copyright had expired (or never existed).
So why should Disney be allowed to BENEFIT from the expiration of the copyright once owned by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brother's Grimm but not be expected to CONTRIBUTE in the same way to the NEXT generation of artists ?
Re:If copyright is forever (Score:4, Insightful)
The The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Aesop want their stories Back.
Yes I am talking to you Disney...
Snow White was made less than 70 years after the death of a Grimm brother (which, under life+70, would have been copyrighted until 1933). 70 years from death of Hans Christian Andersen was 1945! Extended copyright wouldn't have benefited Walt in the early days at all.
Aesop--I think we're safe there, but did the Mouse ever actually use Aesop? (Probably in the short films that I'm too lazy to look up).
And you're caught and jailed for murder. (Score:1, Insightful)
And you're caught and jailed for murder. Now everyone can use work similar to yours and sue YOU for infringing THEIR work, asserting that THEY got it from the Public Domain work, not you.
Meanwhile, being in jail, you don't get to reap the benefit of your work being sold.
Alternatively, you have to become a mass murderer and kill all others who you've been infringing on.
Or you could not kill authors and do your own work.
Yup, it's really silly.
Precedent set, goodbye pop music! (Score:4, Insightful)
Some real good could come of this. You see, many many mass-produced generic pop songs all use the same 4 chords: G, C, F and A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I [youtube.com] -- This video illustrates the point rather well
Now the RIAA/ARAA will never run out of artists to sue. They can take every major pop hit of the last 30 years and have them sue each other back and forth in an orgiastic Roman frenzy of subpoenas. Every pop artist will sue every other one, on and on, with the damages spiraling further and further upward until the songs themselves become worth more when not played at all. Problem solved.
But seriously, come on - ALL art is derivative, music as much as anyone. You experience music and you have a gift for music, your experiences with music and the emotions they trigger in you inspire you to create your own music, you create based on what you've heard because it's what you know. Maybe it's a little different than the songs that inspired you, but usually not on a fundamental level.
But perhaps we should take this model and run with it. Maybe if we can just get this applied to the Summer Blockbuster or the Romantic Comedy formula movies, we can finally do away with all the terrible, predictable, and rote plotlines that we've been subjected to for years.
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:1, Insightful)
"To promote the Progress"? Hardly. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently the usual defense is to identify some work already in the public domain that also sounds the same.
If authors routinely crib from the public domain instead of creating something original for fear of violating copyright, then copyright is impeding rather than "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as another country's constitution puts it.
Re:Nine billion names of God (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1934 (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for the guy who invented the power chord to sue for the hella dollars he is rightfully owed.
Music is a cultural artifact. Cultural artifacts inherently build upon eachother, or else they are meaningless. A big part of music litigation is finding that line between building on what someone else has done, and just straight duplicating. That line isn't always clear. And frequently, trial judges aren't the right people to be making that distinction.
Forget the law (Score:3, Insightful)
Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations? This is possibly one of the globally best known Australian songs of all time. The riff is completely obvious, and it's taken them 20 years to get around to suing?
Re:Well, in truth..... (Score:5, Insightful)
travelling in my tricked out combie
on a, bullshit trial, bird in a gum tree,
i met a strange lawyer, he made me nervous
he took my songs and stole my breakfast
and i said oh! you come from a land down under?
where you write a song and a man can plunder
when you hear does it make you wonder?
you mustn't hum, you mustn't play covers
got sued by a man down under
(he had), some copyrights and my song he plundered
i said do you speak(a) my language?
he just smiled and gave me a legalese sandwich,
and i said oh! you come from a land down under?
where you write a song and a man can plunder
when you hear does it make you wonder?
you mustn't hum, you mustn't play covers
Dying in a den in Bombay
(with a) slack jaw, and not much to say
i said to the man "are you trying to exempt me
from playing my tune in a land of plenty ? "
and he said NO! you stole that riff down under
the flute solo it makes me wonder
these rights we bought to plunder
the tunes you make in a land down under
Does Australia have "fair use"? (Score:2, Insightful)