By Jeremy D. Larson
Last night, a jury ruled in favor of the Marvin Gaye estate in a lawsuit that claims “Blurred Lines” willfully stole from Gaye’s song “Got To Give It Up.” It’s a ruling that could perhaps make litigious what pop music has done since the first time Elvis Presley sung a note on stage: borrow from other songs.
As Keith Harris writes at The Guardian, this case doesn’t make it really set a legal precedent, per se. Most copyright infringement cases are settled out of court so the decision doesn’t lay in the hands of the jury, who are just regular humans largely unfamiliar with copyright laws. In the “Got to Give It Up”/”Blurred Lines” case was especially unpredictable. Harris writes:
“Ultimately, the Blurred Lines case isn’t so much about the scope of copyright protection, or even about the schadenfreude in which we collectively indulge when a smirky ass-man has to publicly empty his wallet and fess up to deceit. It’s about the strange, unpredictable entity that is the American jury doing whatever it is an American jury does while we’re not looking. Eight ordinary people, having had the nuances of US copyright law debated around them for weeks, went back into a room by themselves with a set of instructions and made a decision.”
This isn’t a case of using an unlicensed sample and reaping the profits from it, like the landmark Biz Markie case in 1991. In this instance, it’s just a matter of “feel”. That “feel” might spawn any number of lawsuits in which one artist thinks another artist borrowed a “feel” a little too liberally.
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