And yet George Harrison “my sweet lord”/ “he’s so fine” The Chiffons is totes OK.
To my knowledge, Coulton isn’t suing. This article is from a year after it happened, and about a year ago, and his perspective then was basically “I wanted to, but I’d have lost painfully and expensively and slowly, so it’s enough that my fans thought I was on the right side.” If that’s changed, my Googles don’t find it, but correct me if I’m wrong.
In the end, the only group that did anything to try to slow the spread and mutations of the memes that became the DNA of The Singularity were hated, because they were lawyers.
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Last post of his I read back then was it was with the lawyers. I recall people stating stealing the actual performance was beyond their rights. There were people doing waveform analysis proving it was his recording, not just his song and arrangement. Guess he changed his mind to save his mind.
Wait, what? The Chiffons’ record company successfully sued Harrison for that. (After The Chiffons covered “My Sweet Lord” themselves as a publicity stunt, albeit a pretty clever one.) I’m not saying it ruined Harrison’s career or anything, but he didn’t exactly get away with anything, either.
Were they still writing their material at this point?
i wonder how much Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars has to pay for uptown funk.
the whole song including lyrics is a mashup of other songs.
Did the family member that killed him ever get a piece of the singer’s estate before he himself died?
I’m just upset that the lyrics shown in the blurred lines video are just terribly wrong. Terribly. So many transcription errors I can’t take it.
How is this? I don’t even.
Wow. This feels like they asked somebody who can’t sing on key to describe two different melodies so we can determine their similarity.
And I know the melody is not the issue here. But then there’s nothing original about the beat or the bassline either. And if anybody wants to say that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, well, then, both songs are still completely different.
Coulton understood this very well and he said so, the dick move was that FOX appears to have used Coulton’s recording without compensation. The fact that they also took his arrangement and tried to pass it off as their own was a bad enough, that they used his recording was something to haggle about in court.
I’m wondering if the defense lawyers bothered to get sheet music of the melodies for each song to show the jury, or if they were wise enough/lucky enough to get jurors who were musicians, because even though the tempo and feel and sound of the song is the same, the vocal melody is not anywhere similar.
I am curious to see the court records and arguments, there must be more going on here than I’ve seen reported. The only thing that comes to mind that compares is the Tom Waits vs Frito Lay case.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Or Ledbelly and Muddy, but whatevs…
I wonder if Timbaland produced this song.
Marvin Gaye died 30 years ago. The copyright should have died with him and his children should just get a job to fund there lives not live off rents.
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Could Thicke have argued that his song was clearly offensively stupid enough to count as a parody?
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I can see where there are some mild similarities in feel, but wow, to say that it is direct copyright infringement seems pretty crazy to me. But much of copyright law seems pretty crazy to me.
I thought blurred lines sounded more like Kristin Andreassen’s “crayola doesn’t make a color.…”, albeit them being on the opposite ends of the “hey I like you” song genre cute -> creepy spectrum. What would have happened if Thicke talked about being inspired by a song whose video features happy kids playing paddy-cake?
the main difference here is that the Marvin Gaye song is actually GOOD…
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