A bit of rock music train spotting (aka who sampled who)
LokoOne
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/17-songs-that-blatantly-rip-off-other-songs
This was interesting....some obvious ones but a few I never knew about
This was interesting....some obvious ones but a few I never knew about
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When North American Scum came out, I was clearing samples for a company that had just bought an indie publisher whose catalogue included Pete Shelley's Homosapien amongst others. The LCD song was getting quite a bit of radio and, after hearing it a bunch of times, it finally clicked with me what it reminded me of. I made a call to the guy who we'd bought the rights from - he was still involved with the day-to-day running of the company - and asked him if he'd heard the song and what he thought. His reaction was, they've nicked it, let's get a musicologist involved. So we did, and the musicologist came back and said we didn't have a strong enough case. A few very simple but significant differences, like the rhythm arrangement and the fact that James Murphy spoke/sung the lyrics rather than sang a melody with a clear resemblance to Homosapien, meant it wasn't so clear-cut from a legal p.o.v. as we first thought it might have been.
I commissioned a whole bunch of musicologists reports back when I was in the sample clearance game, and amongst the many things I learnt as a result was that a passing resemblance between one song and another is rarely enough of a basis upon which to take legal action. If you're going to claim that someone else has copied/stolen/plagiarised your work, you have to be able to produce very clear, strong evidence to support that argument - "it uses the same chords" or "that bit of the song that goes da-da-da-d'da-d'da-da sounds like the bit in my song that goes da-da-da-d'da-d'da-d'da" won't cut it.
Semi related, I always thought this was a bullshit call...
http://m.smh.com.au/small-business/men-at-works-down-under-ripped-off-kookaburra-court-20100204-nfiq.html