From time to time I get a wee panic about Coffin Dodgers and I have to go and check that I took the U2 lyrics out: there’s a scene that revolves around a U2 song, and in the first few drafts of the book I quoted a couple of lines from it. That’s a no-no, as Blake Morrison explains:
For one line of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”: £500. For one line of Oasis’s “Wonderwall”: £535. For one line of “When I’m Sixty-four”: £735. For two lines of “I Shot the Sheriff” (words and music by Bob Marley, though in my head it was the Eric Clapton version): £1,000. Plus several more, of which only George Michael’s “Fastlove” came in under £200. Plus VAT. Total cost: £4,401.75. A typical advance for a literary novel by a first-time author would barely meet the cost.
The linked article is two years old. I very much doubt the fees have gone down since then.
[Via Lexi Revellian]
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0 responses to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a £500 copyright licensing fee”
The fees are fair. If they didn’t charge them then bands like U2 would be not be bothered to innovate :rolleyes:
Haha :) U2 can be quite sniffy, apparently: http://xrrf.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-do-you-do-when-bono-says-no.html
For a big chunk of song, yeah, whatever. But for one line? What the fuck happened to fair use?
True story (allegedly):
Jazzy B sued The Beautiful South for their line “Back to bed, Back to reality” and of course won an absurd percentage of the royalties from whichever of their interchangeably banal singles that was. When they lost, they (they claim) went through the contract that assigned the rotalties to him and carefully replaced every instance of his name with the word “cunt”. Then they signed it. Apparently, there were no objections, so that is the contract used by Jazzy B to this day to claim his Beautiful South royalties.
That one act has greater artistic merit than their entire musical output.
Incredible, isn’t it? In the US at least quoting a line or two absolutely should be allowable under fair use, but this is one of those “pay up or we’ll sue you” things where the potential costs of fighting back, even if you’re in the right, are prohibitive.
I liked some of their songs :) That’s a very Paul Heaton thing to do, I think.
The problem, btw, is the market value test of fair use: essentially if you’re not quoting most of it and you’re not damaging the market value of the original work, then copyright law allows for that. Problem is that the music copyright owners in their typically accommodating manner say that any quotation is damaging market value, so for example if you quote a U2 song you’re making it impossible for U2 to make any money from that song ever again. Utter bollocks, of course, and to the best of my knowledge a two-line excerpt of that kind has never been found to be infringing in a court, but £500 is bugger-all compared to the cost of taking on the Rolling Stones’ lawyers in court.
Yes, which is also why Happy Birthday To You gets royalties. Legally, it’s out of copyright, but no-one wants to be the mug who pays a couple of million to prove that in court.
Yes, exactly. It’s a nonsense – even poetry’s good for a couple of lines before you need to pay. I’m not against copyright but this lawyer-driven shit is nonsense.
I always thought that the beautiful south didn’t get enough credit for being completely mainstream while writing songs that were really quite dark. LIke if HMHB went pop.
Jo posted the video on FB. I laughed in a surprised way. :-)
Really? I always thought they got tons of credit for exactly that — a lot more than they deserved. But what they mainly did, surely, was be smug and bland. And Heaton is so absurdly arrogant that he wrote a song dismissing as second-rate hackery any song that contained a woman’s first name without considering whether maybe “Layla” or “Dear Prudence” or a hundred others might be better than anything he’d ever managed. Feh.
Also, he has a voice like nails dragging a goose down a blackboard.
>>And Heaton is so absurdly arrogant that he wrote a song dismissing as second-rate hackery any song that contained a woman’s first name
I can’t think of which song you mean unless it’s Song For Whoever, which I don’t think is about that at all.
It is “Song For Whoever”, yes, and that’s what he said it was about in interviews.
Didn’t Carter USM get pinged and had to cough up for simply having the words “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday” in one of their songs?
>>that’s what he said it was about in interviews.
Hadn’t read that. Different to the lyrics though. The lyrics appear to be about people having deliberately bad relationships in order to write songs about it. The non-single lyric seems to have a revenge aspect too.
>>Didn’t Carter USM get pinged and had to cough up for simply having the words “Goodbye Ruby Tuesday†in one of their songs?
Yup. After the Watershed is credited to Carter, Morrison, Richards and Jagger.
Bollocks, but at least they shared it rather than take it entirely. Bittersweet Symphony was not written by Jagger and Richards.
To make the Bittersweet Symphony story even worse, the verve had tried to get a license but were told they’d used too much for it to be a sample. The agreed deal was then supposed to be 50/50, but when the record started to sell, ABKCO demanded and got 100%.
Fuckers.
Methinks you need to give this show a listen!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xw21s
Oh, I will. Thanks.
Not that it justifies the way they were treated, but what pisses me off about Bittersweet Symphony is that it’s one of the worst uses of a sample ever and the song would have been hugely improved by ditching it and hiring Craig Armstrong or Will Malone or Corin Dingley to do a proper string arrangement. I just get sick to death of hearing the same two bars again and again and again for the entire song.
“I just get sick to death of hearing the same two bars again and again and again for the entire song.”
I think that describes pretty much everything Richard Ashcroft’s ever done :)
True.