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Intellectual Property Law

: SIVACRACY .NET

"... as a supposedly ?creative? artist I am often shocked to discover that a song I?ve written has been a blatant unconscious rip-off of somebody else?s song ..."

By Siva Vaidhyanathan

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So writes Jeffrey Lewis in this NYT piece. Below is a longer excerpt:

Sometimes I realize this as soon as I?ve come up with it: ?Oh, I can?t use that great chorus I just wrote, I guess it?s the same melody as that Gnarls Barkley song.? Sometimes I don?t realize until years later where the ingredients of a song came from. Discussing this with a few friends of mine, we decided to make ?unveiling? mix tapes for each other ? tapes that would reveal the original songs we had, knowingly or unknowingly at the time, been ?inspired by.? (?Inspired by? is sometimes known as ?illegal infringement of copyright,? depending whether or not you?re in a court of law!) I already knew some of the songs I would have to put on my own ?unveiling? tape; I was well aware that certain songs I?d written had been ?inspired by? (since I?m not in court) bits of other people?s songs.

Going through my music collection seeking songs for the mix tape I kept discovering examples I hadn?t considered;I was taken aback by just how much of a rip-off artist I really was. But there they were, plain as day, song after song I had copied in one way or another. Perhaps I wasn?t an original songwriter after all but a lousy cover act, hoping my Frankenstein?s Monster reassembled cover versions would not be noticeable.

It?s true that in my defense I can say that my most successful unconscious rip-off method seems to be to combine songs from various eras and genres, throwing people off the scent. An example of this: In retrospect I can see that ?If You Shoot The Head You Kill The Ghoul,? my 1998 zombie tribute, and still one my my most requested live songs, is basically a mix of the horror-movie-meets-garage-rock lyric aesthetic of late-?70?s Roky Erikson set to a chord progression I?d gotten from a Leadbelly song ? all wrapped up in the Clash?s ?English Civil War.? Time and again I realized how uncreative my supposedly creative songs were.

Full post as published by SIVACRACY .NET on August 11, 2008 (boomark / email).