Ever since humans began writing music, they have always been influenced by their fellow musicians. If composers were never inspired by their peers, music would have never evolved into so many different genres and styles. Modern pop and rock music, for example, would never have existed if the Americans hadn’t been influenced by the Blues music brought over with the slave trade. What is unclear, however, is where the line is drawn between being influenced by a piece of music and just outright plagiarism.
In most cases, copyright law is a wonderful invention, created to defend talented ideas from greedy copycats. Unfortunately, it can also be used to bewilder jurors into giving lawyers and producers a truck load of money. One clear example of this was the 2014-2019 Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit and, in this case, it was professor of musicology, Todd Decker, who was doing the bewildering. Bogged down with complicated musical jargon, the nine jurors became convinced that two songs that are, in essence, completely different were, in fact, identical.
For along time, it seemed that only the melody and the lyrics of a song could be copyrighted because, after all, that is essentially what makes the song, the song. However, this all changed when Robin Thicke was forced to pay damages for using the same beat as Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up in his song Blurred Lines. The main argument that was used to insist that Katy Perry’s chart-topping pop single, Dark Horse was the same as Flame’s Christian rap track, Joyful Noise stretched even thinner than this. He claimed that an ostinato (repeated pattern of notes) that was played in the background of each verse shared “six points of similarity” to the main riff of Joyful Noise. At first listen, they do sound fairly similar. However, the fact is, they’re not exactly the same notes, they’re not played on the same instrument and it’s not even the main melody of the song! He even claimed that he had never heard any song that had the same melodic shape as the two songs which, as I’m sure you can understand, must be a complete lie after thousands of years of musical history.
The more I read into this court case, the more ridiculous it seems to become. The majority of the writing in the lawsuit has nothing to do with the music, at all. Instead, it refers to the tarnishing of Flame’s reputation as a Christian rapper due to the “witchcraft, pagan and Illuminati imagery” in the lyrics and the music video. The lyrics contain one reference to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and the music video has Katy Perry prancing about as an Egyptian. Does that count? You decide. In reality, almost none of the statements made in the lawsuit actually have any evidence to back them up. Even the way they calculated the financial award for Flames’ team was laughable. Somehow, they decided that the afore mentioned ostinato attributed to 22.5% of the song’s success and, somehow, that landed them with the figure of $2.8m.
As much as this case makes me laugh, I am generally worried about the precedent it sets for future law suits. The songs share no other real similarities other than the use of the same scale to write a section of music. They have different beats, different melodies and completely different genres, yet, the jury has decided Katy Perry has breached copyright law. What worries me is, if two songs can’t even use the same pattern of notes, what’s next? Will people be copyrighting chord patterns? Chords? Notes? Maybe, I’m getting ahead of myself but the point is, there is a fine line between copying and being inspired by another artist, but it certainly should not be decided by rich lawyers and the amount of money they can throw at an expert musicologist.