In 2004, Kraftwerk sued German music producer Moses Pelham for using a two second sample from one of their songs. This subjective threshold has been hard to ascertain in instances where an artist has sampled a quantitatively small amount an original work to create a new work – as often done in hip hop and dance music. If copyright subsists in a musical work, it can be infringed only where it is copied and the copyist takes an amount considered by the court (or jury in the US) to be significant. Many consider there to be no significant difference between the three tests, which set a low qualitative threshold for protection to arise. In the US, the test is a threshold amount of creativity. UK law requires that to benefit from copyright protection, a musical work must be original pending Brexit, that threshold is subject to a clarification by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that the work must constitute the expression of “ the author’s own intellectual creation”. Skrillex, Bieber and the Zepp all deny copying the earlier works. Recently, megastar Justin Bieber and electronic music producer / DJ Skrillex have found themselves accused of stealing from a song called Ring the Bell by Casey Dienel to form the hook of their track Sorry. This June, a jury in the US will decide whether Led Zeppelin’s legendary Stairway to Heaven infringed the copyright in a track called Taurus by a band called Spirit. Since then, pop music copyright claims have continued to hit the press. The 2015 multi-million dollar Blurred Lines damages award to the estate of Marvin Gaye made it plain that plagiarism can be an expensive business. The music industry has always been a tinder-box of uncertainty about the reach of copyright widespread borrowing, sampling and outright copying of other people’s tunes and big egos. Well, the arguments over what constitutes legitimate ‘borrowing’ from musical works continue.
We reported late last year on a dispute between rapper Rick Ross and dance-pop duo LMFAO over the use of a hook “ everyday I’m hustlin’” / “ everyday I’m shufflin’” (see here).