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!"
Reminds me of... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess a lot of that goes on, whether intentional or not.
Even If They Lose the Appeal... (Score:5, Interesting)
Precedent... (Score:5, Interesting)
They wrote the song in 1981, and reissued it in 1982, well before the creator's death and subsquent sale of the song to Larrikin. This may set a very bad precedent, since new owners won't always honour agreements predating their ownership.
Re:1934 (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately no, she's not, or this probably wouldn't have happened as she would likely not have sued. She was however alive in 1981 when they lifted the notes.
Realistically though, this hasn't exactly been a win for either party. The judge believes they plagiarized the notes(which is fairly obvious when you listen to both works), but he's only ordered them to pay 5% of future profits and royalties back to 2002. While this song is still played, one would presume the vast majority of the revenue it has or ever will generate was generated prior to that date.
This was always a bit of a funny case since their lead singer is a minister in the current government(he's not actually named in the suit presumably he didn't have righting credits so he's got no financial interest).
Re:Nine billion names of God (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, atleast Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative.
Like the movie Avatar (Score:3, Interesting)
> Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative
I, for one, have never come across a piece of music which was generated by a machine without any intervention of human creative force.
By strict definition, either nothing comes under that classification, or most modern 3-D animated movies do come under that classification.
Yes, I know, the legal system doesn't work that way. Still, it seems to be a stupid law as you state it.
This is not the wrong you are looking for. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_Sits_in_the_Old_Gum_Tree [wikipedia.org]
"Marion Sinclair died in 1988"
"In June 2009, Larrikin Music sued the band Men At Work for copyright infringement, alleging that part of the flute riff of the band's 1981 single "Down Under" was copied from "Kookaburra"."
The problem is not with copyrights lasting more than the creator, since this was infringed withing the creator's lifespan. The question is why is this brought up only now. Isn't there supposed to be something about having to defend your copyrights or some such?
Re:Nine billion names of God (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no need.
By the time you discount all the combinations which sound terrible, you'll have substantially fewer permutations to create. Now, go to any major record company's corporate website and dig out the details for how many songs they claim to hold the copyright to.
It's more-or-less mathematically impossible to write a song today which doesn't have at least a couple of bars which sound like something else. 99 times out of 100, this is a non-issue (either because your song winds up sounding like something that nobody has either heard of or cares about, or because it sounds so obviously like something so fantastically well-known that nobody for one minute - not even the bottom-feeders at the RIAA - believes you'd have been stupid enough to rip it off)
The other 1 time out of 100, you wind up with something like this happening.
Re:Nine billion names of God (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, atleast Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative.
Step 1. Machine generate every possibly melody
Step 2. Register the copyrights in a country which is not Sweden and is a signatory to one or more multi-lateral copyright treaties [wikipedia.org]
Step 3. Apply for the international copyrights
Step 4. ????
Step 5. Call western music complete
Re:Reminds me of... (Score:3, Interesting)
Steal Away (Score:1, Interesting)
Next, they'll be going after Robbie Dupree's 1980 hit 'Steal Away' [80svideos.tv].
That is, if Warner Bros happens to stumble across Wikipedia and find out that "the song is built around a keyboard riff and background vocals notably similar to the 1979 hit version of 'What a Fool Believes' by The Doobie Brothers [wikipedia.org] "
Maybe Dupree was taunting Warner Bros with this aptly tiled song ;-)
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:5, Interesting)
It gets worse. She donated her rights to the song to the Libraries Board of South Australia a year before she died. They then sold the rights to a corporation, which is now suing Men at Work.
So she even tried to donate it to the public good, and its still being used to score free money for people not involved in its creation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:3, Interesting)
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. That in turn might only be possible if you are able to sell or transfer the rights to the work in some way.
That's why the right needs to be transferrable, even though that leads to some abuses. Still, there's no need for the length of time to be very long; shortening it would encourage copyright holders that want to monetize their efforts to get on with it rather than sitting around gazing at their navels.
Still - 25 years after creation should be plenty of time to profit from the work and be a reasonable not to interfere with it becoming part of our culture and derivative works to be created.
Precisely.
Of course Men At Work would then no longer earn any royalties on the song either.
They can always record another version, which will have its own copyright. That's just got nothing to do with the copyright term on the original.
Re:Perversion of the law's intent (Score:5, Interesting)
This shows what a great thing the internet is, provided that we defend it. Ten or 20 years ago you had to trust organisations like libraries to take care of donated product. Now you can just slap a GFDL header on the sheet music and post it to wikipedia. Done.
Re:Somewhat bizarrely... (Score:1, Interesting)
... the whole court case only happened as a result of a TV panel game, Spicks and Specks (Australian version of Never Mind The Buzzcocks). In how many years of every employee of that Australian music company presumably hearing Down Under played how many hundreds of times, nobody noticed until it came up as a curious fact on the telly...
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/quiz-show-sparks-aussie-anthems-battle/story-e6frfn09-1111117725552 [news.com.au]
Sorry to "blow my own trumpet" (or flute in this case), but I recognised that the riff was "in the spirit" of "Kookaburra" from the day the song was released, but, given it was such a small section and not an exact copy I'm amazed it has caused such a fuss... no, scratch that, there were lawyers involved. I'm not amazed at all.
Defense doesn't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
Colin Hay defends the song saying (emphasis added):
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/05/2811671.htm [abc.net.au]
Yet in the music video for "Down Under" a flute player is shown playing the quotation while sitting in a gum tree.
Pure coincidence?
Save the world from your family (Score:5, Interesting)
When you write your will, put a clause that all of your works are released under an OSS or Public Domain License upon your death.
There should be a CC License created for this... "In Memory Of"
Copyright For Life Of The Creator Only? (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
What about works that take enormous amounts of people and money to create like "The Wizard Of Oz" or "Transformers"? Why is everyone generally against an artist, an estate, a corporation (a group of people) owning the property that they create? Ownership of land doesn't expire, as long as an owner pays their property taxes. Whether we like it or not Disney and Paramount and NBC make some decent products. Sure, they are corporations, but they pay creators for the property they own. 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.
As thoughts become more valuable there are incentives created by allowing people to own their thoughts and profit off of it.
What if, for example, I decided to buy some land and build a farm. My intention is that my farm would be a business for my children and grand children, so I work very hard to build that farm and make it profitable and till the land and build silos and invest in equipment. I innovate on my farm so that I am competitive and I create repeatable processes that can be carried on after I die. I employ people and I make food, all of which benefits society. What if my children don't run my farm and my estate runs the farm. Would you want to take away my farm after I die?
Instead now I am a composer. I work very hard to compose songs and I take great personal risk to publish those songs and make them recorded and I spend lots of money creating relationships with directors and producers to put my songs in their films. Should ownership of all my work just evaporate after I die? Why does the farmer get to keep his farm and I have to lose my stakehold?
Re:Copyright For Life Of The Creator Only? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a composer the only way to do something similar would be teach you offspring how to write music and lyrics. Enabling them to earn a living from the fruits of their own labor. The same as the farmers children would have to do.
Re:Copyright For Life Of The Creator Only? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, but composers don't have to pay a property tax each year. If they did, I wouldn't have any problem treating IP as real property.
Posting anon as I've already modded this.
Who are we rooting for again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Indians Sue to take back Manhattan (Score:4, Interesting)
Will it never end? How many years must something be in the dust and the the lawyers just feed off themselves, sueing everyone who sneezes near them? The song "Down Under" is from the 80's, early 80's I think, we talking almost 30 years! And just now we're getting to the lawsuit?
Quick, I think Ben Franklin's estate should sue for all the shit he created that everyone uses without paying for. Ben wanted it to all be freely available, but who cares what *he* wanted, he's dead, and now it's in lawyer hands.
And they aren't thinking about the benefit of all men like Franklin, they are thinking about the benefit of one man. Themself.
And that's why this world is going to shit.
Disney's Kill Bill (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Then I guess Pixar films and Quentin Tarantino's films published through Disney's Miramax brand are your "nearly". But I see your point: Pinocchio and The Jungle Book came out within two years of Collodi's and Kipling's respective copyrights expiring in major markets.
Re:Disney's Kill Bill (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you seriously suggesting that Pixar and Tarantino TOGETHER have made them as much money as Snow White alone ? Not to mention Rapunzel, The hunchback of Notre Dame, Alladin, Tarzan (again - came out within a year after Buroughs original copyright expired).
They have a roughly 80 year history of films made from stories that were in the public domain, not to mention the additional income from toys and other branding. The pixar and Tarantino branches are both only in the last 20 years or so of that period.
Disney has a history of taking works from the public domain and creating profitable works from them - and then claiming copyright on said derivations. I have my doubts about the morality of this but it's certainly legal. The point is though - Disney is so intent on keeping their one truly original creation (Mickey Mouse) under copyright and NOT contributing it to the world as the people they took from did that they have ensured the extension of copyright TWICE to make it happen.
That's not even considering that where it suited them - they have on occasion actually outright stolen stories that were copyrighted creating highly profitable works - simply because the small companies they were stealing from simply could not afford to try and sue them. The lion king is perhaps the worst example of that.
Tit for tat goes the saying. We set up copyright in the way it is so THAT companies like Disney could take it's stories and make movies people love - that's fine. It's NOT fine to refuse to play ball and give you own works BACK to that pool when the time comes so that OTHER companies and people can do the same.