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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!"
Reminds me a bit of Bittersweet Symbphony, the Verve song that was deemed to have ripped off an obscure version of The Last Time by the Stones.
I guess a lot of that goes on, whether intentional or not.
...This has got to be seen as a win for the band. They have to pay royalties back to 2002... which is >20 years since the song was released and became a monster hit. Surely its earnings potential has slacked off some since then. Imagine how bad it would be if they had to come up with royalties back to its heyday...
They wrote the song in 1981, and reissued it in 1982, well before the creator's death and subsquent sale of the song to Larrikin. This may set a very bad precedent, since new owners won't always honour agreements predating their ownership.
Unfortunately no, she's not, or this probably wouldn't have happened as she would likely not have sued. She was however alive in 1981 when they lifted the notes.
Realistically though, this hasn't exactly been a win for either party. The judge believes they plagiarized the notes(which is fairly obvious when you listen to both works), but he's only ordered them to pay 5% of future profits and royalties back to 2002. While this song is still played, one would presume the vast majority of the revenue it has or ever will generate was generated prior to that date.
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).
Well, atleast Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative.
> Swedish copyright law states explicitly that machine generated things can't be copyrighted because they're not creative
I, for one, have never come across a piece of music which was generated by a machine without any intervention of human creative force.
By strict definition, either nothing comes under that classification, or most modern 3-D animated movies do come under that classification.
Yes, I know, the legal system doesn't work that way. Still, it seems to be a stupid law as you state it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_Sits_in_the_Old_Gum_Tree
"Marion Sinclair died in 1988"
"In June 2009, Larrikin Music sued the band Men At Work for copyright infringement, alleging that part of the flute riff of the band's 1981 single "Down Under" was copied from "Kookaburra"."
The problem is not with copyrights lasting more than the creator, since this was infringed withing the creator's lifespan. The question is why is this brought up only now. Isn't there supposed to be something about having to defend your copyrights or some such?
It gets worse. She donated her rights to the song to the Libraries Board of South Australia a year before she died. They then sold the rights to a corporation, which is now suing Men at Work.
So she even tried to donate it to the public good, and its still being used to score free money for people not involved in its creation.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that the story is uninteresting.
Anyway, by the way you write, you sound like a teenager so you're probably too young to remember Men At Work's major hit "Down Under".
I can't say I'm even a fan of the band myself but the fact is this article is more about the music industry and licensing than it is about the band themselves - so go sit quietly in a corner and contribute when you have something interesting to say.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This shows what a great thing the internet is, provided that we defend it. Ten or 20 years ago you had to trust organisations like libraries to take care of donated product. Now you can just slap a GFDL header on the sheet music and post it to wikipedia. Done.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Colin Hay defends the song saying (emphasis added):
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/05/2811671.htm
Yet in the music video for "Down Under" a flute player is shown playing the quotation while sitting in a gum tree.
Pure coincidence?
+0 Meh
When you write your will, put a clause that all of your works are released under an OSS or Public Domain License upon your death.
There should be a CC License created for this... "In Memory Of"
Make America grate again!
Will it never end? How many years must something be in the dust and the the lawyers just feed off themselves, sueing everyone who sneezes near them? The song "Down Under" is from the 80's, early 80's I think, we talking almost 30 years! And just now we're getting to the lawsuit?
Quick, I think Ben Franklin's estate should sue for all the shit he created that everyone uses without paying for. Ben wanted it to all be freely available, but who cares what *he* wanted, he's dead, and now it's in lawyer hands.
And they aren't thinking about the benefit of all men like Franklin, they are thinking about the benefit of one man. Themself.
And that's why this world is going to shit.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
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).
Then I guess Pixar films and Quentin Tarantino's films published through Disney's Miramax brand are your "nearly". But I see your point: Pinocchio and The Jungle Book came out within two years of Collodi's and Kipling's respective copyrights expiring in major markets.