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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.
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
Are you seriously suggesting that Pixar and Tarantino TOGETHER have made them as much money as Snow White alone ? Not to mention Rapunzel, The hunchback of Notre Dame, Alladin, Tarzan (again - came out within a year after Buroughs original copyright expired).
They have a roughly 80 year history of films made from stories that were in the public domain, not to mention the additional income from toys and other branding. The pixar and Tarantino branches are both only in the last 20 years or so of that period.
Disney has a history of taking works from the public domain and creating profitable works from them - and then claiming copyright on said derivations. I have my doubts about the morality of this but it's certainly legal. The point is though - Disney is so intent on keeping their one truly original creation (Mickey Mouse) under copyright and NOT contributing it to the world as the people they took from did that they have ensured the extension of copyright TWICE to make it happen.
That's not even considering that where it suited them - they have on occasion actually outright stolen stories that were copyrighted creating highly profitable works - simply because the small companies they were stealing from simply could not afford to try and sue them. The lion king is perhaps the worst example of that.
Tit for tat goes the saying. We set up copyright in the way it is so THAT companies like Disney could take it's stories and make movies people love - that's fine. It's NOT fine to refuse to play ball and give you own works BACK to that pool when the time comes so that OTHER companies and people can do the same.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *