Musicology

In the comedy world, jokes are sacred. If you tell another comic’s joke and fail to give attribution, woe unto you. Accused joke thieves get slaughtered — Carlos Mencia and Amy Schumer spring immediately to mind. But what if an irony is just out there and observable by more than one comic? Maybe it’s coincidence? …

As you may have guessed, a new lawsuit says she did. Heidi Merrill is suing Underwood, saying that NBC’s Sunday Night Football theme song, “Game On,” is a ripoff of Merrill’s own, “Game On” which she’d written a year or so earlier. Moreover the complaint includes that she met Mark Bright, Underwood’s producer, at an …

Headlines broke out earlier this week about Stairway To Heaven going back to court. Those headlines have people confused. So, here’s what’s really happening and what’s likely, according to me, to happen next.  For those of you in a hurry I’ll make these few main predictions: There will not be a whole new trial. Zeppelin’s …

Before we answer that, these guys have real names. Artem Stoliarov goes by Arty and he’s suing Christopher Comstock. He’s Marshmello. I probably won’t use their real names again.  The complaint, filed last week, says Marshmello’s monster hit song, “Happier,” infringes upon Arty’s remix of “I Lived,” by One Republic. So, why isn’t One Republic …

Well, it’s not completely ridiculous. “I Don’t Care” is Justin Beiber and Ed Sheeran’s brand new single (as I type this, it came out yesterday.) I’d be hard pressed to think of another combo more certain to reach #1 as fast as Billboard can refresh? So everyone has heard the hell out of this track …

The inverse ratio rule has been part of copyright law for a long time, but sooner or later hopefully we can agree that it never really made a lot of sense and we should just let it go. And to illustrate we’ll take the two most interesting copyright infringement cases in recent memory; one that …

First, what’s a soundalike? Imagine for a minute you’re in advertising, working on a campaign; a commercial maybe. You’ve got the messaging and visuals, and you’re on to “what about music?” And then a song occurs to you, a familiar one that everybody knows and relates to in a manner that will support your vision …

No. Jumping right on this one, because it’s straightforward. This morning we have headlines that Juice WRLD is getting sued, again. Sting pretty much owns “Lucid Dreams” now, rightly. And this new suit comes because a young artist from Colorado, Jerome Willisch, who works under the name Fly Jxy, is under the impression that “Lean …

Any day is a good day to sue Ed Sheeran. [ UPDATE: (Oct ’22) This article was mostly written in 2019. I’ve written others with more tedious granularity since, but this is still a decent summary.] Sheeran has been sued twice in this, the summer of 2019; the other, I’ll go out of my way …

Timberlake and Will.i.am are being sued for stealing “Damn Girl.” And I’d say they’ve got a big problem. Justin Timberlake and Will.i.am (William Adams) are facing an infringement suit over “Damn Girl,” their collaboration from Timberlake’s very successful “Futuresex/Lovesounds” record. That record is a decade old. And this case was filed in 2016. But after …