Musicology

Taylor Swift has been fighting this one battle for years. Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler sued Swift in 2017 because her biggest hit song of them all, “Shake It Off,” in their view, infringes upon their 2001 hit, “Playas Gon Play,” recorded by 3LW. “Shake It Off,” of course includes the lines, “cuz the …

I’m a musicologist, and I’ll explain it in just a few steps. Let’s begin with… Know what infringement is in the first place. How succinctly can we define music copyright infringement? Music copyright infringement is, “copying a sufficient amount of music that’s original to and protectable by another copyright holder such that the law should …

Among other things. Meta (formerly Facebook) stands accused of copyright infringement and is being sued by production music company Epidemic Sound for “damages” of 142 million dollars!!! We can talk about the ins and outs of that later. First, though, do you wonder how on earth Epidemic Sound came up with that number? Here’s an …

While watching TV last night, a few distinct thoughts struck me, and together they converged to inspire this post. My first thought, which I’d had countless times before, was the tremendous impact of the music in “Better Caul Saul.” It’s distinctive and perfect, and they sure deserve their recently announced Emmy Award nomination. (Third nomination …

Strict adherence to Arnstein is inefficient and potentially corrupting. Arnstein v. Porter (That’s Cole Porter) put in place the two-pronged test for infringement. The idea is that we first ask if someone copied a work from a pre-existing work, and then, secondly and separately, whether that copying constitutes improper appropriation, which is comprised of substantial …

Marshall Jefferson is suing Ye because Jefferson’s iconic 1986 track, “Move Your Body,” was allegedly sampled without permission on Kanye’s Donda 2’s “Flowers” and to make things potentially more complicated, Kanye’s song and therefore “Flowers” samples are distributed on a hardware device that allows remixing the stems. (The maker of the player, Alex Klein, is …

I like this song; the other one; not Mariah Carey’s; no, I mean the plaintiff’s. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Vince Vance & The Valiants is a nice little holiday track. Not so much in June, no, but a week before Christmas when I’ve heard the Mariah Carey version a hundred times, …

It’s that “Standing Outside The Fire” by Garth Brooks sounds a ton like “Conviction Of The Heart” by Kenny Loggins. And this conflict came to a supposedly “amicable” settlement many years ago. But Loggins put out a memoir recently and brought up the whole thing again and it sounds a bit less amicable. Settlements don’t …

Go big or go home, I guess? Songwriter and performer Andy Stone is suing Mariah Carey and a co-writer for $20 Million because he might actually believe “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is an infringement of his own song by the same title released a few years prior. I know, nobody wants to …

One for my lawyer friends. My expertise is musical, not legal, but of course, I think about music through a legal lens pertaining to copyright law. And I’ll get frustrated with the way things are handled, legally, from time to time. This is one of those times. The last time I tried to be so …