![]() However, he subsequently successfully sued Sam Smith and their co-authors over similarities between their Stay With Me and his own I Won’t Back Down, which prompts the question of why one was all right but the other wasn’t? (Perhaps it’s because Casablancas confessed while Smith claimed never to have heard I Won’t Back Down). Tom Petty was similarly blithe about the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas admitting they had “ripped off” Petty’s 1976 track American Girl on their hit Late Nite: “I was like: ‘OK, good for you … a lot of rock’n’roll songs sound alike,’” he said. “Fine by me … it’s how rock’n’roll works,” shrugged Elvis Costello when earnest voices started protesting about Olivia Rodrigo’s Brutal borrowing from his track Pump It Up. His bandmate Jet Black actually thanked Elastica for drawing attention to the Stranglers’ oeuvre. “Yes, it sounds like us, but so what?” remarked the Stranglers’ Jean-Jacques Burnel over the Elastica case, adding that if it were up to him, rather than his publishers, the case would never have been brought. Often their responses to alleged theft are tellingly equivocal. It’s a dividing line so shaky that not even musicians themselves really know where it lies – and they may well want to keep it that way. As for the decisions, music theory is a complex business, largely beyond the ken of people who don’t specialise in the field, but these plagiarism trials frequently rest on asking a jury of people who don’t specialise in the field to decide difficult musicological, even philosophical questions about where the dividing line between inspiration and theft lies. Money may be one factor in the pursuit of these cases: last week, an entertainment lawyer told the Guardian that there was the whiff of a “celebrity lawsuit” about the Sheeran case. The decisions can seem strange too: listen to Whigfield’s deathless novelty hit Saturday Night, then listen to Rub-a-Dub-Dub, a 1969 single by the Equals, and boggle that the latter’s author, Eddy Grant, failed in his attempt to prove he’d been ripped off. ![]() ![]() In the Britpop era, Elastica settled out of court with Wire and the Stranglers, respectively, over their songs Connection and Waking Up, yet the glaringly evident similarity between Oasis’ Cigarettes and Alcohol and T Rex’s Get It On never occasioned legal action. Who gets sued for copyright infringement and who doesn’t seems weirdly arbitrary. ![]() In response, 200 songwriters, ranging from members of Earth Wind & Fire to Linkin Park, filed an amicus brief protesting against the decision which punished “songwriters for creating new music inspired by prior works”. It would have been a reiteration of the verdict in the 2015 Blurred Lines case, which, like Sheeran’s recent lawsuit, was brought not by a musician but a deceased musician’s heirs, and ruled that Robin Thicke and his co-writers had plagiarised the “feel” of Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up. Had Sheeran lost the copyright case yesterday, while his retirement might have provided some relief to his detractors, it would have spelled very bad news for pop at large. And yet it’s also easy to understand Sheeran’s apparent anger and frustration at yet another high-profile court case accusing him of theft – and not merely because he’s an artist who has always prided himself on his authenticity, given his self-propelled trajectory from sofa-surfing open-mic night singer-songwriter to one of the biggest pop stars in the world: “I’m real, I do it all, it’s all me … I didn’t go to Brit School,” he sang on his early hit You Need Me I Don’t Need You.
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