Re: [Harp-L] copyright issues and permission



Re: the copyright of a groove.

In Australia recently, the flute groove in the iconic Men at Work tune 'Down Under' was found to be a derivative of 'Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree'. Last I heard, there was a large amount of money involved and the lawyers were salivating...

Better check with a lawyer. :(

Chris Tognela

On 30/03/2010, at 15:43, Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


How does that work if you use say the mojo working groove but have different lyrics. Is it groove based or lyric based or ..... we are planning a demo cd and this info would very useful to save a ton of anguish/$$.

You can't copyright a groove. I don't remember exactly how it turned out, but Michael McDonald's people were said to be pretty ticked off when the pop song Steal Away pretty much copped the precise groove of What A Fool Believes. But I doubt anyone had to pay anything, even though that groove was fantastically original.


Used to, you couldn't copyright an arrangement.

Now you can, but copyrighting a groove doesn't sound likely. A song is what gets copyrighted - lyrics, a melody, changes, all together. An arrangement can't be stolen the way they used to be stolen, but I believe it has to be associated with a song. It's mainly to prevent 'sound-alike recordings, which mimicked hit songs quite precisely.

I'm not a lawyer, so you have to take my advice with a giant grain of salt, but though there have been many lawsuits for song theft, I never heard of anyone copyrighting a groove or suing for such a thing. The Mojo groove is part of American music, even if someone had to invent it to begin with.

Now, if you also copped the melody, you might consider coming up with a new one.

Deifik's Sound-alike Story: Selling sound-alikes for cheap was a real business back in the 70's. Many of the eight track tapes sold in truck stops were sound-alikes. They sold for alot less than the original hit, and most people probably couldn't tell the difference. I used to make part of my living playing on those things. I was hired to copy Charlie McCoy's parts, and so were some other harp players. Often the same guys that were on the original recording just did it again for the sound-alike producer, who was a beloved and legendary figure in Nashville, a world-famous musician whose music had gone out of fashion, just trying to make a living. I also came in when a hit recording had a non-professional playing harp. Grrr. I played on the sound-alike of John Denver's Back Home Again, which had some very non-professional sounding harp on it. It's hard to play like a newbie if you aren't a newbie. It was much easier to copy Charlie McCoy, though it wasn't a picnic. Years later I worked for a company in NY that bought this Nashville sound- alike company, only I didn't know they owned the recordings I was on. Boxes of their recordings came in, and I pulled one out and started playing it on my office turntable. The first song was Back Home Again. It sounded ever so slightly off. Then the harp player came on and I said to myself "Gee, I don't recall that harp player playing so clean. I thought he was an amateur." Then I recognized myself.




This archive was generated by a fusion of Pipermail 0.09 (Mailman edition) and MHonArc 2.6.8.