This song by George Harrison makes fun of the copyright infringement case he lost

[boingboing]

Originally published at: This song by George Harrison makes fun of the copyright infringement case he lost | Boing Boing

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[FGD135]

Not to mention Taxman.
Which I like very much, but refuse to call it a protest song.

The Beatles - Taxman

[ChuckV]

@boingboing

By the way, John Lennon didn’t exactly leap to his former bandmate’s defense. In a 1980 Playboy interview, Lennon expressed doubt that Harrison’s copying of the “He’s So Fine” was subconscious:

“He must have known, you know. He’s smarter than that … He could have changed a couple of bars in that song and nobody could ever have touched him, but he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he thought God would just sort of let him off.”

Come Together | Lawsuit

[anon33932455]

A bit derivative.

[allenk]

The case might have been settled out of court, but during the proceedings, Harrison and fellow ex-Beatles John Lennon and Ringo Starr fired their manager Allen Klein, who then negotiated to buy Bright Tunes Music, and using inside knowledge of the song’s sales and value, pushed for higher damages.

not me btw

[Bemopolis]

If I remember correctly that SNL episode showed another Harrison video, “Crackerbox Palace”, which was filmed on the grounds of his estate, garden gnomes and all.

George Harrison - Crackerbox Palace

[danimagoo]

@boingboing

And the line “As this song came to me, Unknowingly” has significance, as one of Harrison’s defenses was that he didn’t copy the song purposefully. In one of the legally important aspects of the case, the court ruled that this didn’t matter – Harrison had admitted that he’d heard “He’s So Fine,” and so even if he copied it subconsciously, it’s still an infringement.

This happens to songwriters not infrequently. On St. Vincent’s most recent album, there’s a song that is strikingly similar to Morning Train, made famous by Sheena Easton. In fact, the writer of that song got co-writing credit on St. Vincent’s song, My Baby Wants a Baby. St. Vincent said she thought she had come up with this great hook one weekend and decided to build a song around it, and then woke up on Monday morning and realized she’d just recreated Morning Train inadvertently. She did the right thing, though, and secured the rights before recording.

[ephoph]

I see a lot of mashups out there - where’s the My Sweet Lord / He’s So Fine mashup?

[timber_munki]

Thought this would have been ‘Sue me, Sue you Blues’ from the 1973 album Living in the Material World.

Sue Me, Sue You Blues

[Aeroplane]

As somebody who has listened to both, and is otherwise a fan of George as a Beatle and his individual work and with the Traveling Wilbury’s, it really is 100% a rip-off. I can understand how he might have forgotten where he heard it, or who sang it, or that it was a previous song… but there’s no way it’s an entirely independent creation. Mashing them up wouldn’t sound like anything new, it would sound like a mashup of Wierd Al and whoever he’s spoofing.

[Franko]

it’s like the audience in the courtroom were let loose in the costume department and just put on basically anything all at once, lol.

[Franko]

i love seeing him so young and goofing around.

[Bemopolis]

That Peter-Sellers-toothy-smile-out-of-the-side-of-the-mouth is on full display here.

[anon33932455]

Would that video be illegal in Florida?

[geoduck]

Semi-random tangent: in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, a character sang one line of a Beatles song, and the producers promptly got sued by Paul McCarthy. And so in a later HHGTTG novel, Douglas Adam included a running gag about McCarthy writing songs and buying up ever-bigger chunks of England with the profits.

EDIT: Doing some further internet-scrounging on the subject, maybe I was misled about McCartney and Hitchhiker’s; there was evidently a couple of lines used from a Beatles song in the original radio broadcast, but they were cut out of the subsequent tape/record/CD/download version(s) because rights couldn’t be secured, not because of an active lawsuit. Dunno if this prompted the McCartney jokes in Life, the Universe and Everything.

[ChuckV]

Didn’t McCartney not own the publishing rights at that time?

[stinkinbadgers]

I love that song. It’s fun when I hear something I liked when I was 7 and think, “yeah nice one kid, you had good taste!”

When I was that age the line “I was so young when I was born” cracked me up.

[anon61221983]

He’s never owned the rights… Michael Jackson bought them in the 80s (?), but I don’t remember if that was before or after when HHG2G aired…

[ChuckV]

MJ apparently got them in ‘85. So after the first radio series.

A Brief History of the Ownership of the Beatles Catalog

1969: After relations between the Beatles and James deteriorated, James sold his stake in Northern Songs to ATV Music, owned by Lew Grade, and despite Lennon and McCartney’s attempts to offer a counter bid, ATV gained control of the catalog. Later that year, the duo sold their remaining shares to ATV, leaving them without a stake in the publishing of their own songs (they both controlled their own respective songwriting shares).

1985: ATV Music, having been acquired by Robert Holmes a Court, was put up for sale. Michael Jackson, who had famously been told about the value of publishing by McCartney during the sessions for their 1982 collaboration “Say, Say, Say,” purchased ATV’s 4,000-song catalog for $47.5 million, becoming the owner of the approximately 250 Lennon-McCartney songs, as well as tracks by Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Elvis Presley and more. McCartney, to say the least, was not pleased.

[anon61221983]

Cool! Thanks!