Blurred Verdict ?

The recent court decision awarding Marvin Gaye's heirs over $7 million in damages from Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke over the "substantial similarities" between "Blurred Lines" and Gaye's classic "Got To Give It Up" was, at first, music to my ears, since I already blogged strongly in Marvin's favor, with all those noble thoughts about originality and integrity. But then I started thinking about the nature of music.

Is it possible that Gaye was ripped off? Yes. But you also have to take into account that someone somewhere might just come up with a similar beat at random that just happens coincidentally to sound similar.The nature of music - especially popular music - has always involved borrowing tunes, especially in the case of an idiom like the blues, which incorporates similar standard riffs over and over again. The crux of the matter revolves around copyright law and a famous term known as "fair use". Simply put, fair use refers to the nature and use of a copyrighted work in another context, such as education or training, with legal limits on what is permissible. Court decisions have been all over the road, the most bizarre being a decision favoring the Rolling Stones over an orchestral riff that was actually written and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.

The only really convincing "substantial similarity" case as far as I'm concerned is the Led Zeppelin - Spirit controversy, which claims that Page, Plant et al stole a riff from a Spirit tune and then used it as the theme for Stairway To Heaven. I actually had a copy of Spirit's album back in the day-they were out of California. The two tunes sound almost exactly alike, so keep your ears open for another court action.

It is not out of the realm of possibility that artists do come up with similar ideas at different points in time in a general sense, but, when so-called original music sounds EXACTLY like someone's else's , you have to wonder where that inspiration came from.