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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!"
Fuck, is the guy who wrote this even still alive?
Oh right, copyright law is written for zombies.
Why don't all you "Pirates" come together and write a computer program to generate all possible melodies for the 32 bar AABA, form. Then publish the whole lot under the creative commons license or whatever, call western music complete, and then download in peace.
Also these lawsuits are always bunk. Noone ever sues over the harmony do they?
Copyright law was originally intended to contribute to the arts by incentivizing creation with a temporary monopoly for the creator. Hands up whoever thinks Ms Sinclair wouldn't have written this song if she knew some company 75 years later weren't able to get a cut of something they had absolutely no part in creating.
Trademarks can be lost if they become common generic terms in the language. It happened with Aspirin, Escalator, Zipper, Thermos, and Yo-yo. It almost happened to Kleenex and Xerox, and could happen to Google ("why don't you google it?").
Perhaps copyright needs a similar exception. If your song/phrase/work becomes an iconic symbol of something else (in this case, Australia), then clearly the benefit to society of not having it protected by copyright outweighs the author's right to profit off it. So it should lose its copyright.
Clearly this is encouraging more works to be created.
To be honest I would love to see at least one example of an author who created a culturally significant work pre-1950 who has created another meaningful work in the last 10 years.
Strange the Larrikin Wikimedia page does not mention it, but it is now a Warner Music Group holding (bought by Festival Records, swallowed by Warner Music Australasia).
The *IAA's successfully bought off the Aussie politicians in full public view, it is only natural that they get to recuperate that "investment" in Aussie law changes. Bad thing for Australia is: The carrot they offered in return has turned out to be a dud - those silly Aussie politicians sold out for little more than shiny trinkets of no value.
Good point though I suppose most people thought "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree" was written so long ago that a claim was unlikely. I certainly thought so.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
So I if someone kick you in the teeth you will see that as a win since they could have shot you instead?
Seriously, this is based on a similarity so vague that no one noticed it for more than twenty years! After hearing the "original" I've realised that this is not just a loss for the band, it could easily set precedence to be a serious problem for all aussie songwriters. After all, I know of lots of famous songs which is at least as similar to each other as these two are
That's it? Ten notes, four tones, not even played in the same mode?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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.
If I owned the copyright to Homer, the Greek, Roman, and Norse tales, and Shakespeare, then I could prevent any new work of narrative from ever being created and sold.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Never knew that such a surreal song had such a literal music video. Oh, well.
They're referencing Kookaburra all right (the flautist actually sits in an old gum tree), but they are not "sampling" it as half the notices about this says. They are also playing it in a minor key, while it's in a major key in the original.
It's also an 80 years old children's song. With four tones, eleven notes in the disputed part. The world is mad.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
>Whether we like it or not Disney and Paramount and NBC make some decent products.
To answer your question: 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).
So why should Disney be allowed to BENEFIT from the expiration of the copyright once owned by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brother's Grimm but not be expected to CONTRIBUTE in the same way to the NEXT generation of artists ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, and even Aesop want their stories Back.
Yes I am talking to you Disney...
Snow White was made less than 70 years after the death of a Grimm brother (which, under life+70, would have been copyrighted until 1933). 70 years from death of Hans Christian Andersen was 1945! Extended copyright wouldn't have benefited Walt in the early days at all.
Aesop--I think we're safe there, but did the Mouse ever actually use Aesop? (Probably in the short films that I'm too lazy to look up).
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
And you're caught and jailed for murder. Now everyone can use work similar to yours and sue YOU for infringing THEIR work, asserting that THEY got it from the Public Domain work, not you.
Meanwhile, being in jail, you don't get to reap the benefit of your work being sold.
Alternatively, you have to become a mass murderer and kill all others who you've been infringing on.
Or you could not kill authors and do your own work.
Yup, it's really silly.
Some real good could come of this. You see, many many mass-produced generic pop songs all use the same 4 chords: G, C, F and A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I -- This video illustrates the point rather well
Now the RIAA/ARAA will never run out of artists to sue. They can take every major pop hit of the last 30 years and have them sue each other back and forth in an orgiastic Roman frenzy of subpoenas. Every pop artist will sue every other one, on and on, with the damages spiraling further and further upward until the songs themselves become worth more when not played at all. Problem solved.
But seriously, come on - ALL art is derivative, music as much as anyone. You experience music and you have a gift for music, your experiences with music and the emotions they trigger in you inspire you to create your own music, you create based on what you've heard because it's what you know. Maybe it's a little different than the songs that inspired you, but usually not on a fundamental level.
But perhaps we should take this model and run with it. Maybe if we can just get this applied to the Summer Blockbuster or the Romantic Comedy formula movies, we can finally do away with all the terrible, predictable, and rote plotlines that we've been subjected to for years.
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
Apparently the usual defense is to identify some work already in the public domain that also sounds the same.
If authors routinely crib from the public domain instead of creating something original for fear of violating copyright, then copyright is impeding rather than "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts", as another country's constitution puts it.
Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations? This is possibly one of the globally best known Australian songs of all time. The riff is completely obvious, and it's taken them 20 years to get around to suing?
travelling in my tricked out combie
on a, bullshit trial, bird in a gum tree,
i met a strange lawyer, he made me nervous
he took my songs and stole my breakfast
and i said oh! you come from a land down under?
where you write a song and a man can plunder
when you hear does it make you wonder?
you mustn't hum, you mustn't play covers
got sued by a man down under
(he had), some copyrights and my song he plundered
i said do you speak(a) my language?
he just smiled and gave me a legalese sandwich,
and i said oh! you come from a land down under?
where you write a song and a man can plunder
when you hear does it make you wonder?
you mustn't hum, you mustn't play covers
Dying in a den in Bombay
(with a) slack jaw, and not much to say
i said to the man "are you trying to exempt me
from playing my tune in a land of plenty ? "
and he said NO! you stole that riff down under
the flute solo it makes me wonder
these rights we bought to plunder
the tunes you make in a land down under
If something similar happened in the US, I would claim fair use because it's not copying but rather quoting a small portion of the melody (just the "merry merry king of the bush is he" part) in a new context that offers commentary. "Down Under" is after all a song about Australian culture, so it quotes a well known Australian children's song.