Procul Harum vs Procul Harum
p2pnet.net News:- “If copyright law weren’t so strict about when public domain kicks in, Bach’s heirs could be having a field day, just as Beethoven’s estate could make a mint from Walter/Wendy Carlos for that pop knockoff of his Ninth Symphony and Bizet’s estate could sue for the indignities committed by Malcolm McLaren and others against his Carmen.”
And you could go on.
The quotes in the intro comprise the last paragraph to an OpEd in The Globe & Mail on the fact an ex-Procul Harum keyboard player Matthew Fisher is claiming royalties for riffs linking verses in the band’s famous A Whiter Shade of Pale.
Fisher, now 60 and a computer programmer, “claims that he was instrumental in the creation of one of the most successful songs in British musical history – and wants a share of the royalties – a claim denied by Gary Brooker, leader of the band,” says The Times Online.
So, he played for Mr Justice Blackburne, “who studied music and law at Cambridge, to prove his claims that the Bach-inspired organ embellishment that made the song a worldwide hit was, in fact, his own idea,” says the story.
However, “The claim is being vigorously defended by Gary Brooker, the band’s vocalist, who says he and lyricist Keith Reid, wrote the song,” says The Independent. “Mr Brooker based his tune on Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Air on a G String’ – which he had heard on a Hamlet cigar advertisement – and Bach’s Sleepers Awake.”
Acting for Fisher, Iain Purvis, QC, told Blackburne, “Mr Fisher now seeks a declaration that he is entitled to a share – an equal share in the musical copyright for the song as originally recorded.”
And by way of a footnote, “‘I got a bit sick with the music business as a whole,” Fisher says in a Croydon Advertiser interview. “It’s run too much now by marketing people who are more concerned with how the band looks than what it sounds like.
“If I was 18 years old again, I wouldn’t want to go into the music business now.”
Also See:
The Globe & Mail – Bach to the future, November 14, 2006
The Register – They skipped the light fandango and are turning cartwheels in the courts, November 14, 2006
The Independent – The day courtroom 56 swayed to the sound of ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, November 14, 2006
Croydon Advertiser – Air of unreality, February 23, 2001
p2pnet newsfeeds for your site.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss
Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
November 16th, 2006 at 11:02 am
“If copyright law weren’t so strict about when public domain kicks in,…”
A wrong assumption. There is nothing strict about copyright duration. it is a grab bag of confusion:
1. The star Spangled Banner ans well as almost all latin american national hymns, public domain works, are licensed by the performance collectives.
2. Some Renoir sculptures are no longer in the public domain because the works were copyright climed by a Renoir assistant many years after Renoir died.
3. Revisions of public domain music is routinely claimed by music publishers to be in copyright. The revision is so minor you cannot tell the difference, upon hearing the music, between the revised and original versions. On a guitar work, the change could be in the fingering. It is never specified that the copyright claim is for the “arrangement”.
4. Here in Puerto Rico a music publisher claims to own and licenses the music of great composer Juan Morel Campos, who died in 1896. The allegedly fraudulent copyright claim was reported to our Justice Department 18 months ago by a group of mostly musicians. The investigation results are nowhere to be seen.
5. Music score of a work by Mozart, etc. are routinely published with misleading copyright notices on the cover even though the works are in public domain.
The list and the confusion it creates could be never ending.
Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com