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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
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.
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 *
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 *