The songwriters of “Obvious” included Mr. Prince, three members of a British music collective called the Six and another singer, Jasmine Thompson. They claimed that one line in “Friends” (“Haven’t I made it obvious, haven’t I made it clear?”) infringed on a similar line in “Obvious” (“Did I make it obvious, did I make it clear?”).
Ms. Dunn, one of the writers of “Friends,” said in an interview that she believed the claim was “ridiculous,” but that her advisers had instructed her not to fight it and potentially end up in court, where the outcome would be unpredictable.
“Everyone was like, ‘Let’s just clear it up and make it go away,’” she recalled. “I reluctantly settled.”
Ms. Dunn declined to divulge any details about the settlement terms. Marshmello and Anne-Marie declined to comment, and representatives of the writers of “Obvious” did not respond to inquiries.
Copyright disputes are nothing new in music. In the United States, they go back at least as far as a lawsuit over the illicit publication of the sheet music of W. J. Wetmore’s “The Cot Beneath the Hill” in 1844.
Occasionally, an outlying case will force industrywide adjustment. In 1976, for example, songwriters had to reckon with the idea of unintended infringement after George Harrison was found to have “subconsciously” based his first solo hit, “My Sweet Lord,” on a girl-group classic, the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine.” After the decision, Mr. Harrison wrote in his memoir, he felt a “paranoia about songwriting that had started to build up in me.”
The “Blurred Lines” case, many lawyers and executives say, has become the latest watershed, putting the commonly understood rules of songwriting up for debate.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/business/media/plagiarism-music-songwriters.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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