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AU Band Men At Work Owes Royalties On 'Kookaburra'
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!"
bbcnews.com article with, I guess, the same story - can't tell because original link gives a server generated "Sorry, Page not Found" error
The person who wrote it wrote it as part of a competition for the girl scouts. She is long dead and the scouts sold the rights long ago.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/06/2945781.htm
According to the bbc article:
Larrikin Music, which is owned by London's Music Sales Group, bought the rights to the classic folk song in 1990, following Sinclair's death in 1988.
The original author is dead a few years now according the the linked article.
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh kookaburra laugh kookaburra
Gay you life must be.
Sung to the flute riff on "Land Down Under"
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
The Verve sampled that obscure version of the track and licenced the use of it so that wasn't unintentional. I think the problem was the Stones representatives thought they ended up using too much of the sample in the song. They realized this only after the song became a success, of course.
wrong band. Peter Garrett was Midnight Oil.
Even with only 5% royalties and six years, that's apparently still a six-figure sum.
Wouldn't have guessed they were still averaging $333K+ a year in royalties. I can see why these aging rockers tend to fight for copyright extensions.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
... 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
The copyright holder was asking for 60% of royalties, and the judge decided that was a ridiculous amount, so reduced to 5%. Still is a bit much, but it could have been quite a lot worse.
Last I heard, Colin Hay is still touring.
Note that the "Happy Birthday" song is also under copyright, and the owners in the last decade or so have gotten quite insistent about being paid for it. Which is why you don't hear that song sung much anymore. Even those cheezy theme restaurants that try to embarrass you on your birthday since their own birthday songs instead. I'm no longer in kindergarten (for a few years now) but I suspect they don't sing it much in schools anymore either.
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).
I presume you are referring to the Environment Minister Peter Garrett? He was in Midnight Oil, not Men at Work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqOIdtKZTG4
Ah, poor old George Harrison. But I don't think he'd actually kill anyone over it. He seemed to take it with a certain amount of humour.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Where is this strange world you live where Kleenex, Xerox and Google *almost* became common terms referring to the generic?
Anywhere outside the USA.
I blow my nose with tissues.
I photocopy things with a photocopier.
And I search for things with Bing or Yahoo. I also google for things with Google.
Jeez, would people stop saying the notes were "sampled" already? The NPR story made the same mistake. The actual flute player in the band played an actual flute -- there was no sampling involved.
Yes, it's still wrong.
"Recoup" is a transitive verb, "recuperate" is intransitive. You can't "recuperate" losses or an investment or anything.
It's not usually the artists, who (in the music industry in the US at least) don't hold copyright to their own work. Unless they've changed the law to say differently (and since the corporates are the ones lobbying for copyright extensions and whatnot, I doubt it), the record label holds the copyright, not the artist.
Free Martian Whores!
No, you're still wrong. Recuperate can be transitive or intransitive. OP's usage is questionable at best, but the transitive usage of recuperate can mean "to regain" which would make sense in OP's sentence.
recuperate (r-k'p-rt', -ky'-)
v. recuperated, recuperating, recuperates
v. intr.
1.To return to health or strength; recover.
2. To recover from financial loss.
v. tr.
1. To restore to health or strength.
2. To regain.
[Latin recuperre, recupert- : re-, re- + capere, to take; see kap- in Indo-European roots.]
recu'pera'tion n., recu'pera'tive (-p-r'tv, -pr--tv), recu'perato'ry (-pr--tôr', -tr') adj.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Actually, they didn't "rip it off," they sampled it directly - for which they asked and received permission to do so, and allocated 50% of the royalties to Jagger and Richards. ABKCO (representing the Stones) later claimed that, while they did give permission for sampling in exchange for half the royalties, the Verve used more of the song than they had originally agreed to, and asked for (and got) 100% of the royalties.
And all of this happened contemporaneously with the popularity of the song, not 20+ years later.
So, really, nothing like this case at all.
Copyright law has stated that phonorecords are "works for hire" since the 1950s. The way around the law (and how musicians I know do it) is to have your own record label. Sign with Sony and they own your copyrights, unless you have a contract that says Sony gives those rights back. And I can't see any of the greedheads from any of the majors doing that.
The Beatles never held copyright on any of their works. Michael Jackson wound up holding them when the Beatles' label sold them, and Jackson outbid McCartney with some rediculous sum.
BTW, you don't OWN a copyright, you HOLD copyright. A copyright is not ownership, it is a free lease on work that belongs to the public, at least according to the US Constitution. YMMV in other countries, same with other aspects of copyright law. Other countries may well allow the artist to hold the copyright. If the Beatles would have recorded under a non-US owned label they might well have retained rights; I don't know what British law says.
Free Martian Whores!