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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.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/06/2945781.htm
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.
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
.....Men at Work do come from a land down under, where women glow and lawyers plunder.
...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.
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.
... 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
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.
> 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.
Nobody expects the Copyright Inquisition.
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?
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqOIdtKZTG4
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.
Kookaburra sitting in the old gum tree ... ah, primary school humour.
F***ing all the sparrows he can see
Stop kookaburra
Stop kookaburra
That one's got VD
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.
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!
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.
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
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.