🎵 2022-03-17 16:44:17 – Paris/France.
Dua Lipa was hit with two lawsuits this month over her hit song "Levitating."
The first of the copyright infringement lawsuits comes from Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System, which accused Lipa of copying its 2017 song "Live Your Life." The second comes from songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who allege Lipa stole two of their songs — "Wiggle and Giggle All Night" (1979) and "Don Diablo" (1980).
Variety spoke with musicologists E. Michael Harrington, who consulted on Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" case and were approached by Linzer and Brown in their attempt to defeat Lipa; and Judith Finell, who provided expert historical testimony on behalf of the Marvin Gaye Estate in the infamous "Blurred Lines" case.
While "Levitating" certainly shares similarities with the plaintiffs' work, Harrington and Finell explain why determining infringement requires more than meets the eye.
Sound similarities
“Looking alike is almost always irrelevant,” says Harrington, pointing out that music in a particular style will generally be built on the same musical ideas and patterns that define the genre.
Harrington points out that in Western music there are only 12 notes. However, the vast majority of popular music is limited to a fraction of these, as there are only seven notes in the major scale.
Harrington compares it to having a conversation within the confines of the English language: “Sometimes this word leads to this word leads to this word. It's the same with musical notes… What juries need to understand is that you can independently create the same notes without copying them.
As analyzed in a YouTube video by music theorist Adam Neely, "Levitating" and "Live Your Life" are in the key of B minor and are around 100 beats per minute. Both choruses contain the Bm7-F#m7-Em7 chord progression, but "Levitating" resolves to Bm7 (or, the "one"), while "Live Your Life" remains on Em7. According to Neely, the notes sung in each chorus versus key also share a similar pattern. Also worth noting are the lyrics. The chorus of "Life Your Life" goes, "All day, all night / Party to the sunrise", while "Levitating" follows a similar rhyme scheme and also contains the lyrics, "I need you, all the night / Come on, dance with me. »
Neely says, “The melodies on 'Levitating' and 'Live Your Life' are nearly identical. The same notes in the key are targeted to the same beats with the same rhythm… which is called the Charleston: a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note followed by a rest. Despite this, Neely says he doesn't think Artikal Sound System has any reason to sue.
Although at first glance sound recordings sound the same, it is important to remember that musical aspects such as key, tempo and instrumentation are not protected by copyright law. . The supposed lyrical similarities? According to Harrington, to suggest that using a few "common" words in a pop hook is an offense is "dumb".
According to Finell, what is protected by copyright are “specific sets of musical expressions — not ideas, but expressions. It means a series of lyrics, a series of pitches or rhythms that formulate a melody, a series of chords or harmonies, and other types of identifiable characteristics. Songs can share the style and not end up in a copyright lawsuit. But when they share real and serious identifiable creative traits that are protected by copyright law…that's when lawsuits happen.
"Wiggle and Giggle All Night" and "Don Diablo" share a similar vocal melody in the verse of "Levitating", but no other major musical similarities are present.
Prove Access
For a plaintiff to win an infringement action, he must, among other things, prove that the defendant had access to his work, which shows that he could reasonably have seen or copied it. There are three theories of access that plaintiffs can use: the chain of events theory (proving that the copyrighted work was transmitted to the defendant), a combination of mass dissemination and unconscious copying (proving that the copyrighted work has been widely disseminated by means of radio, television or the Internet) or having a striking similarity (proving that the two works are so similar that there is no explanation other than copying).
It's likely that Artikal Sound System is hoping to demonstrate a striking similarity, as in their lawsuit, the reggae band claims the songs are so similar that it was "highly unlikely that 'Levitating' was created independently."
In the other complaint, attorneys for Brown and Linzer point to interviews in which Lipa "admitted that she deliberately imitated earlier eras" and "was inspired" to create a "retro" sound. Emulating eras and drawing inspiration to create a retro sound, however, is far from copyright infringement.
One of the focal points of the "Blurred Lines" essay was a 2013 GQ interview, in which Robin Thicke said, "Pharrell [Williams] and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite song of all time was "Got to Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye. I was like, 'Damn, we should do something like this, something with this groove.' "Although, again, inspiration is not synonymous with offense, the quote provided the Gaye estate with an explicit link between 'Got to Give It Up' and 'Blurred Lines', and it worked against Thicke. and Williams during the trial.
The writing process for "Levitating" is also well documented, but in this case, it works in Lipa's favor. Specifically, in a 2020 episode of the "Song Exploder" podcast, the pop star and his collaborators discuss how the intro synth loop "almost immediately" led to the creation of a verse and chorus melody.
Finell notes that the creative process behind the music ultimately does not influence the "level of similarity". However, it is one of many extra-musical factors that can end up influencing a jury.
Prior art
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for Artikal Sound System, Brown and Linzer is that all of the works considered rely on prior art.
“There are 140 words in copyright law. The most important is original. He says, 'Copyright protection subsists in the original works of the author,'” says Harrington. “There are decisions that say something is not original enough to merit protection. »
In other words, while plaintiffs claim that Lipa infringed their copyrighted expression, the very ideas they claim as original can be found in numerous examples of prior songs, making their arguments in favor of the rather fragile originality.
Neely points out that the Charleston rhythm isn't new and has been used extensively in songs by the Jackson 5, DNCE and, perhaps most notably, Outkast's "Rosa Parks" to name a few. some. The chord progression of "Live Your Life" is also extremely basic and can be heard in earlier songs like "Evil Woman" by Electric Light Orchestra. According to Harrington, the central melody of "Wiggle and Giggle All Night" and "Don Diablo" appears in an earlier song by Hank Williams.
In order to determine infringement, claimants must prove that their own work is sufficiently original. If so, it could be an uphill battle.
What happens next?
While it's possible these lawsuits will go to a jury, Lipa may also seek to settle out of court, a trend that has apparently increased in the years since the "Blurred Lines" case.
After the ruling, Thicke and Williams' attorney Howard King told Rolling Stone: "I feel like I've let songwriters around the world down by helping to set this horrible precedent that someone 'one can make a claim based on a song that sounds the same, but is materially different – and if they can find eight people who don't read the music, they could win.
While the impact of this lawsuit may have been overstated in the years immediately following it (Finell says there are "a lot of misconceptions about the 'Blurred Lines' case and its impact on the creativity,” while Harrington admits that the number of frivolous copyright lawsuits “seems to have died down”), for a few years it seemed like something of an apocalypse for songwriters. For example, in 2015, Jidenna gave up preemptive writing credit to Iggy Azalea for his song "Classic Man" for fear of going to court. He said on Hot 97, “Since Robin Thicke and Pharrell's decision, we felt it was important to make sure we're safe. When that Robin Thicke verdict came out, we realized the game had changed in the music.
The "Blurred Lines" case united musicians against what they saw as frivolous lawsuits. In 2016, 212 artists, composers, producers, musicologists and other music professionals banded together behind Thicke and Williams and filed an amicus brief, in which they argued that the court must restore "limits to the scope of copyright, to ensure that future authors and authors downstream creators can draw from the source of existing works.
Harrington says he, and presumably other musicologists contacted by Brown and Linzer, declined to get involved in the Lipa lawsuit because he is convinced that "Levitating" is not an example of copyright infringement. With prominent music theorists speaking out against the litigation and expert witnesses hesitant to join the fight against Lipa, only time will tell if the pop star will face legal ramifications, settle out of court or will come out unscathed.
Below you will find each of the works in question. You are the judge.
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SOURCE: Reviews News
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