
The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/arts/music/blurred-lines-led-zeppelin-copyright.html
======
Balanceinfinity
Shocked the story didn't mention the Fogerty suit - the strangest copyright
-music case of all

[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-
fogerty-...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/27501/time-john-fogerty-was-
sued-ripping-john-fogerty)

~~~
g-erson
Something weird going on with that page! The article number in the URL changes
back and forward between 2 numbers as you scroll! Makes coming back to HN a
bit tricky!

Interesting read though

~~~
cyxxon
In my case it changes when the _next_ article comes up. This is a really weird
page format some online news magazines have adopted, where they simply add
different articles at the bottom of your original page, infinite scrolling
style. If you scroll back up though, it switches back.

~~~
philipov
I hate it when pages do that.

------
moomin
My (least) favourite example of this is that Iggy Azalea gets a song-writing
credit for Classic Man. [http://www.mtv.com/news/2215334/iggy-azalea-fancy-
classic-ma...](http://www.mtv.com/news/2215334/iggy-azalea-fancy-classic-man-
jidenna/)

If you listen to the two, you can spot the similarity but... it’s nowhere
close to sampling or plagiarism. They’ve got different melodies, different
feels, just a similar prominent keyboard sound.

But no-one wants a court case, so the writers of Fancy get a cut.

~~~
midgetjones
My least favourite was Quentin Tarantino demanding a songwriting credit for
Fun Lovin' Criminals' Scooby Snacks, just because it sampled a few seconds of
dialogue from Pulp Fiction.

~~~
dspillett
Would you prefer he demanded royalties instead, as their label would if he
used a few seconds of their output in one of his films? Or that they just be
able to use the sample without credit _or_ royalty?

~~~
midgetjones
He did demand royalties, he gets a 40% cut as well.

~~~
gamblor956
Roughly 40% of the lyrics are dialogue from two of his movies or describing
scenes from those movies (Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), so a 40% cut of
the songwriters' share of royalties is appropriate.

~~~
onion2k
He didn't write any of the song. He just made something that contributed to
it.

Saying he wrote part of it is like the person who mixed Davinci's paint
claiming to have painted part of the Mona Lisa.

~~~
nailer
It's more like if Mona Lisa incorporated a background from another artist.

------
wgj
NYT draws the wrong conclusions. In each of these cases, the jury sided with
the more popular and well known party. These were all jury cases where
perceived career accomplishment is the common thread, as the law itself twists
in any way necessary.

~~~
wwweston
The “Dark Horse” case didn’t seem to break for Katy Perry...

------
kstenerud
I wonder how well the 1987 album [1] would do in this new climate?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_(What_the_Fuck_Is_Going_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_\(What_the_Fuck_Is_Going_On%3F\))

~~~
ilamont
I've told this story before. In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and
Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and
European pop charts as The KLF
([https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/...](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/07/20/537708922/how-
three-austrian-unknowns-misunderstood-klf-s-the-manual)).

One day we received in the mail a cassette tape and a letter from a law firm
representing a composer or publisher (I can't remember which) of a famous
Broadway soundtrack from the 1960s. The letter accused the KLF of
infringement. The cassette contained one of the songs on the Broadway
soundtrack, an instrumental section of which repeated a three note riff that
sounded a lot like the same three-note sequence from one of the KLFs biggest
hits. The rhythms and song structures were otherwise nothing alike.

It didn't seem like an obvious example of copying, and it was quite possible
it was a coincidence or some obscure influence on The KLF or their core
musical collaborators, who would have been youths when the Broadway soundtrack
was released.

"Are you going to fight this?" I asked the label's president.

Her answer: "No."

From The KLF's perspective, it wasn't worth a long, expensive legal fight they
might lose. I think a lot of it related to the problems it encountered with
the "1987" album you mentioned, which had been partly done to ridicule the
record industry but really took a lot of energy to deal with when the legal
troubles emerged.

Also, the label president didn't say it, but potential bad press could have
also been on her mind. At the time, the KLF had the British music press eating
out of their hands, and a public legal fight could change the narrative of the
KLF as being brilliant pop iconoclasts to something less favorable.

~~~
rock_hard
I need to tell you this: in the 2000s we worked off the strategy and tactics
outlined in The Manual and had a string of global chart topping successes

I can only assume others did the same...do u know the bigger story?

~~~
ilamont
I would love to hear more.

I've heard of at least one other band that had this kind of success, and it
does not surprise me in the least. Drummond knew how the industry worked as a
musician, manager, and skeptic, and in that book outlined a formula that could
work. It was a bit of a piss-take but there were nuggets of wisdom and truth.

~~~
rock_hard
Trying to keep this account disconnected from my real life persona so won’t
name names.

But we had a series of number ones around the world in countries like the US,
Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, Brasil, France, Italy, China, Australia...really
every country you have ever heard of.

Of course some of the tactics had to be translated into 2000s world but I
still recommend aspiring music artists to read it when they ask me for advice
today.

It’s of course not the only strategy that works...but I’d say it’s the easiest
to execute if what you want is commercial success

So in either case the book levels the expectations (“sex, drugs and money will
always be a problem”) and establishes some fundamentals...and it’s of course a
really fun weekend read.

Many of the general ideas also translate 1:1 to startups or really any kind of
endeavor and have served me very well in my career

~~~
ilamont
I always remembered the line from the book about finding a bass line being
like a "panther on the prowl" and IIRC mentioning Billie Jean or some other
Michael Jackson song as an example. It really made sense.

The same section also warned against hiring some "thumb-slapping dickhead" to
play bass which made sense from their perspective (The KLF never used bass
players) but doesn't hold true for all types of songs, even dance music.

~~~
rock_hard
I remember now

One of my takeaways was to not try to do everything yourself...if fact to try
to do nothing yourself except piecing together existing stuff in novel ways

I just watched a YouTube video of one of the producers of Demi Lovato and he
frames it like this:

“What makes a great producer is not the ability to play any instrument or be a
good engineer or anything. You can find others to do that for you. What makes
a great producer is the ability to know how to tell a compelling story with
your work!”

Paraphrased from here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kre17S89-j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kre17S89-j8)

I think this is true for any product...your are selling people on a
story/vision...of what could be, not what is!

------
empath75
Zeppelin have long been known to be notorious plagiarists:

[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led-
zeppelins-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/led-
zeppelins-10-boldest-rip-offs-223419/)

~~~
agumonkey
I think I saw a news recently that they've been dismissed for gateway to
heaven

~~~
klodolph
Stairway is not a ripoff of Taurus and it never was going to be, but there are
plenty of other accusations against Led Zeppelin that are more credible. I
have Spirit’s eponymous album, the part in question that is “ripped off” is so
basic and found in so many songs you’d die before you could list them all.

(FYI—You the news you “think you saw recently” is in the linked article above
the fold, which features a photo of Robert Plant right next to the headline.)

~~~
Applejinx
Stairway to Heaven has contrary motion in the top voice of the guitar
arpeggio, which I consider a really substantial change. They did grab lots of
blues songs, occasionally gave some form of credit, otherwise not.

It's an interesting question: blues is mostly delivery, so if you take a
concept like 'lemon' or 'leave me' and deliver it in shrieky overwrought
British rock star fashion, aren't you rewriting it, perhaps significantly? You
can't copyright the pentatonic scale. It'd be like someone copyrighting the
monotonic drone and then filing suit against half of EDM. I performed for a
livestream recently and used a riff from Plastikman 'Marbles', except that
riff is only note-note-rest-note-note-rest repeated infinitely on one note.
Part of it is the tone and context, and I wasn't cloning that, just the way
the extremely brief three-note chunk cycles over a 4/4 beat. Plagiarism?
Plagiarism because I know of 'Marbles' and found it inspiring? What if I
picked a simple repeating pulse because I'd heard that in some minimal techno,
and intentionally did my own take on that because I'd liked it?

------
sushisource
This might be one of the stupidest arguments I've ever heard:

“Thin copyright might apply to a doll or a painting because, for example,
there are just so many ways to paint a tomato,” Busch said. “Creative choices
are limited. It has never applied to music because there are literally an
infinite number of creative choices in creating a song.”

... So you're saying there _aren 't_ infinite ways to paint a tomato?

~~~
nicholassmith
That's a terrible argument isn't it? There's a finite number of musical notes,
a finite structure to them and a finite number of effects. We're guaranteed to
end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner rather than later.

~~~
wahern
> We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner
> rather than later.

Technically that's fine. Copyright only protects originality, not novelty as
with patents. Coincidentally creating the same melody as someone else doesn't
violate their copyright. If they sued they'd have to prove that it wasn't
coincidental with evidence that you heard the original melody, a prerequisite
for proving that your melody was derivative.

That's the theory. In practice the first person to publish the melody often
wins, _especially_ if their version was popular--e.g. a radio hit, which by
itself provides circumstantial evidence that you had heard it.

~~~
champagneben
Wow - never knew that!

------
ThomPete
What really interesting about Blurred Lines is that it was more the feeling of
the music than the actual note for note, which was the center of the
discussion. If you don't understand music and what it entails you could be
convinced that it was the same.

Such an interesting case.

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah, it was getting close to copyrighting a _genre_.

Very dangerous stuff.

~~~
djmips
Exactly, I immediately thought of all the bog standard country, rock and blues
songs.

------
merricksb
[http://archive.md/e2Kih](http://archive.md/e2Kih)

------
WalterBright
A reasonable thing would be to consider "fair use" as any clip less than, say,
10 seconds.

~~~
UncleMeat
Would it? Could a movie include a 10 second clip from Star Wars without
trouble? Even something iconic like the title card?

~~~
heyoo
Probably. Would it hurt Star Wars?

~~~
WalterBright
Nope. In fact, it would be good advertising for Star Wars.

------
nogabebop23
All of these NYT stories bring up a blocking modal dialog requiring me to log
in or create an account (I guess this is a slight improvement from making me
pay). Is this the same for everyone else? Why do other sites that show a
dismissable overlay get raked over the coals as if they are criminals?

What value is there in posting a link on HN if it's behind a pay (or
temporarily free) wall? This goes double for the WSJ. Let's not debate
business models here, but asking what's the intent/requirements, and why the
double standard?

~~~
boomboomsubban
There is no rule against pay walled content, and most NYT stories have
numerous people complaining about it. The NYT and WSJ posts still get votes
because they're large enough that many people are subscribers, and their
paywalls are trivial to bypass.

~~~
emanuensis
The workarounds for WSJ do not work anymore for me, eg the redirect from
FarceBorg will still get the "subscribe" page. Also FT. They appear to have
removed workarounds. Are they STILL valid HN submissions ... even when there
is NO workaround?

Or maybe there is one and i haven't twigged to it yet:-)>

~~~
boomboomsubban
[https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

~~~
emanuensis
Ah yes, "Bypass Paywalls" i do have this extension installed and have been
using it for months. WSJ seems to have wizened to his workarounds, and others
like the FB redirect. Eg it does not work for

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbc-sheds-light-on-chinas-
rebou...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/rbc-sheds-light-on-chinas-rebound-
after-coronavirus-11585128601)

But i will submit a request at his github site.

In the meantime, AFAIK, there is no workaround for WSJ. Is it still OK to
submit them to HN? i do notice there have been few recently.

~~~
boomboomsubban
The latest release notes from seven days ago say they fix the WSJ, but there's
also a commit saying that they are temporarily reverting while they wait for
Mozilla to sign the update. So there seems to be a way to bypass it still,
though I'm not sure what it is.

------
FriendlyNormie
If I repeatedly linked to my own site with a title that interested you but all
you could see on my page was an unskippable ad demanding that you sign up and
pay for my unrelated product, wouldn’t my site be banned from HN? Why do sites
like nytimes get a free pass with their paywalls?

~~~
tyingq
I feel the same way. My intuition tells me only some small percentage of HN
readers have a NYT subscription, so these posts are of little use. Though the
posts keep appearing, so perhaps I'm wrong, and it's really substantial...like
at least 25%? What's the threshold where it makes sense?

~~~
tzs
The value in HN is mostly in the comments, not in its role as a link
aggregator. A good 90% of the time when the link is to something I cannot
access I can still get all the salient points necessary to understand and
benefit from the discussion just from reading the comments. (Also, if it is a
story on some reasonably current event or some well known subject there is a
good chance a quick visit to a search engine will find some other article that
covers nearly everything in the submitted article but that I can read).

I think of HN as like a social gathering. Each discussion thread is like a
small group of people at a party standing around talking about some topic.
It's a big party, and there are dozens of such small groups, constantly
forming and breaking up, as people move from group to group.

If I'm at a party, and I see a group discussing a book they have read and I
have not, I'm either going to ignore their discussion completely if I'm not
interested in the topic or am planning on reading the book later and want to
avoid spoilers, or go ahead and join in if I'm interested in the topic and and
not worried about spoilers and they are discussing it in general enough terms.

I'm not going to try to tell everyone at the party that they should only talk
about books that everyone there has read.

If there is some particular site(s) that someone just does not want to see on
HN at all, it's easy to address that with a couple bookmarklets. Here's one
that will hide NY Times articles from the listings:

    
    
      javascript: (function () {
        var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
        for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
          if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes'))
            stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = 'hidden';
      })()
    

It would be easy to expand it to cover multiple sites.

Here's one to unhide them:

    
    
      javascript:(function () {
        var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
        for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
          stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = '';
      })()
    

Stick those bookmarklets someplace easy to invoke, and then at the cost of one
click per page of 30 links you don't have to see the site(s) again.

------
arduinomancer
Can't read the article. I feel like this just encourages low effort comments
from people skimming the headlines.

~~~
jgwil2
There are several easy workarounds already mentioned in the comments: hit
escape, disable javascript, clear your cookies, or visit the archived version
at [http://archive.md/e2Kih](http://archive.md/e2Kih)

