Here's why the "Blurred Lines" verdict bothers me: it bothers me because it plays into an ever-more-pervasive myth in this country that success is solely the product of original ideas and hard work. Let me start by disabusing everyone of the notion that there is such a thing as an original idea. Every artist, every musician, every chef, every inventor, every writer, every "maker" steals from someone-- usually multiple someones. Marvin Gaye stole his ideas from someone. Led Zeppelin stole their ideas from someone. Elvis and The Beatles stole their ideas from someone, and the people they stole from stole their ideas from someone too. The difference is that, back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, musicians and music fans did not have instant access to practically every song ever recorded. If a guitar player was into some old, obscure blues recordings, he or she could rip off those cats without any mainstream music fans being the wiser. To be clear, however, it's not as if a derivative work just springs fully-formed from the head of Zeus. What makes an artist an artist is the unique ability to amalgamate a variety of often disparate ideas, to churn them around in their mind, and to spit out a new thing ... a new thing that is based upon a bunch of old things but which is also greater than the sum of its parts. Blatant copying of ideas does occur, to be sure. For instance, when the producers of "Ghostbusters" couldn't get Huey Lewis to record the theme song, they hired an unknown L.A. studio musician (Ray Parker, Jr.) to duplicate Huey Lewis' sound. Parker hit too close to the mark, and "Ghostbusters" ended up with the same bass line, note-for-note, as "I Want a New Drug." Parker was sued successfully, and I understand why, but as a musician, I've listened carefully to "Blurred Lines" and "Got to Give It Up." I can't find any blatant note-for-note or chord-for-chord copying, and of course the lyrics are totally different. I mean, listen to "Showdown" by ELO and then listen to "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" and then tell me that Jeff Lynne wasn't ripping off Marvin Gaye in much the same way. The most you can say is that Pharrell and TI and Robin Thicke copied the "feel" of the song. So what? What songwriter hasn't copied the feel of another artist's song? That's how it works, pretty much. You don't just sit down in a room and say, "I want to write a song that sounds like Joe Schmoe." You'll usually have a song that's in the form of a basic chord structure and lyrics, and when you sit down with a band, because of the product of the members' varied influences, you'll often spit out something that resembles the groove of some other song. It's usually inadvertent. Sometimes, even blatant plagiarism is inadvertent. Billy Joel tells a story about how, when he first presented "Moving Out (Anthony's Song)" to his band, his band laughed at him, because he had inadvertently lifted the melody from Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain." Joel of course changed the melody of the song into its current form, but pay attention to the rhythmic structure of the lyrics. It's still "Laughter in the Rain." Some of you may also remember back in the 80s when John Fogerty was sued for plagiarizing himself. His former record company still owned the rights to all of the CCR catalog, and they felt that "Old Man Down the Road" was too similar to "Run Through the Jungle" (which Fogerty also wrote but did not own the rights to.)
You see, competition is what makes any market-- including the music market-- healthy, but the ugly truth is that, in order for there to be healthy competition, you have to allow a bit of stealing to take place. Our Founding Fathers understood that, which is why some of them were initially against having patents and copyrights at all. They ultimately compromised and gave authors exclusive rights to their work for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author was still alive. This is a far cry, however, from the current copyright term of 120 years for corporations or the life of the author + 70 years for individuals. Our Founding Fathers understood that, in order for ideas to flow freely, there needs to be a limit to how much you can milk them. This is true not just for art but for business as well. The more you prop up the old, big players, the more you prevent new, small players from entering the game. Now, Pharrell and Robin Thicke are hardly small players, but the problem is that this decision sets precedent that is likely to hurt small players in the future. It's already hard enough to write songs without inadvertently stepping on someone else's melody or chord structure (just note how many pop songs stole from Pachelbel.) Now songwriters have to be careful to avoid stepping on someone else's "feel" as well? The problem is: every time we make copyright law more stringent, we are not empowering the small indie artists, because those artists aren't the ones who have the time and money to sue people. We are empowering the big players. We are helping the rich and famous stay rich and famous while making it harder for up-and-coming "makers" to achieve the same success. We are allowing the previous generation to prevent the current generation from doing the same things they did. Like I said-- every artist steals. For an artist to say "you can't use that groove-- I invented it" is about as hypocritical as a business owner, who made millions on the backs of teachers and construction workers and police and firemen, to then turn around and say that we need to cut funding for those jobs.
In this case, it wasn't that the artist said anything-- he's dead. His estate was already worth millions. In this case, it was the family of the artist who sued. In and of itself, that doesn't bother me as much as the thought that, given the history of recording industry shenanigans, the game is not likely to remain confined to those narrow parameters. The major labels are hurting, and I could easily see one of them building upon this precedent to sue an indie artist such as Taylor Swift for stealing, for instance, the groove from Toni Basil's "Mickey" or some other old song to which the label owns the rights. It's really easy for people to sit back and point fingers at the songwriters for their lack of originality, but anyone who says that has never tried to write a song. Even before The Internet, it was pretty hard to string a handful of chords together in some form that someone else hadn't thought of before. These days, however, even if you aren't intentionally borrowing a riff or a chord structure or a groove from another artist, then ten thousand people on the Internet will find some obscure artist that you sound like-- usually one you've never heard of. Don't get me wrong-- I'm complimented when people do that, but only as long as no one sues me!
Like so many other things in this country, I feel that this decision will enable the old guard to further stack the deck against the new guard. It's yet another example of why competition and a free market are not necessarily compatible ideas. If you leave a market alone, it will eventually distill into a few big players (or even sometimes just one!), and the first thing that a big player will do is seek to eliminate competition, which means eliminating or absorbing the small players and merging with other big players. Consumers love competition, but businesses hate it. That's why there needs to always be a balance between pro-consumer and pro-business policies in order to keep markets healthy. There needs to always be a balance between over-regulation and deregulation. The unfortunate truth of the music business is that making copyright laws more stringent (over-regulation) is not helping the artists down in the trenches. It's helping the Disneys and the Sonys of the world. I believe that an artist absolutely deserves copyright protection for his/her work, but not beyond the artist's lifetime, and probably not even beyond 56 years (I personally am in favor of a 28-year term with a 28-year extension if the artist is still living. That's the way the law was written up until 1976.) We need public domain music and art and literature. It's what creates a continuous thread of common culture, a "national canon" if you will. It's what allowed Aaron Copland to create "Hoedown", for instance, or Disney to create just about every fairy tale movie they've ever created. One could hardly say that Disney's "Cinderella" or Aaron Copland's "Hoedown" was "stolen", but each one of those works bore a lot more resemblance to its parent work than "Blurred Lines" bears to "Got to Give it Up." And yet it is Disney who has lobbied for their copyrights to be extended to 120 years, in order to prevent others from doing exactly what they did. It is big companies like that who have done their best to eliminate Fair Use, so even quoting and parody are not safe anymore.
Marvin Gaye died in 1984. His work should be part of our national canon, right up there with Steven Foster. New artists building upon his work to create new works is the greatest tribute we could ever give to the man, but who will dare to do that now? Ironically, in an attempt to secure Marvin Gaye's lasting legacy, his family may have just ensured that he has none. People aren't going to continue to listen to 70s recordings forever. At some point, new generations will want new music to call their own, and if the older generations aren't willing to let the new generation co-opt some of their ideas, then those ideas will likely die.
