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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!"
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
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
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqOIdtKZTG4
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.