That's My Song!: A Look at Plagiarism

Collaborating is one of my favorite ways to write a song. Its nothing like getting together with fellow musicians, song writers, and singers that you respect.  Although, you might feel like this is the circle where you can trust everyone, its not always the case. Whether its who wrote the song or are you giving credit to parts of a song you've used.  It's necessary to get these things street from the beginning.

There was the court case between a song writer Janne Suni and super producer Timbaland.  He produced a song for Nelly Furtado called Do It. Suni was suing for the usage of samples from his song Acidjazzed Evening.  Timbaland denied all claims and said he heard the music on an old Commodore 65 Game System.  He also said he didn't know who it belonged to anyone. In the end, the case was dismissed for the plaintiff because it was found that the song was never sent for copyright.  Huh? I was a little confused.  I was trying to find more information other than Wikipedia, but it was interesting to me that Timbaland, knowing it wasn't his music on that Commodore 64, didn't check for the owners of the music.  I'm just wondering. Not cool in any instance.  

In the gospel genre of music there was this great song performed by Vashawn Mitchell and written by Darius Paulk. The song rose to the top of the charts and everyone loved it.  It even won a Stellar Award for Song of the Year.  But there was another person claiming to be the other writer on this song, Travis Malloy, and he's suing EMI Gospel and Darius Paulk for have of the earnings.  According to Paulk he wrote the song by himself and Malloy says that Paulk sang the song to him and he wrote the music to it.  The case is still open and I'm very interested to see what the outcome will be.  I do believe that if they were together working on this tune and Paulk didn't pay Malloy for his services, they should share the copyright.  

The last example I wanted to point out is why its important to understand the contract and follow it.  Matthew Knowles company Music World Entertainment, also the father of superstar Beyonce', is being sued by Cathy Hughes, owner of Radio One.  She is suing his company, BET, and MTV for violating the exclusive rights deal she has with the Essence Festival in New Orleans.  This article is interesting because it seems to have gotten personal with Ms. Hughes.  Since she knew that Matthew Knowles company has some of gospels great new stars, she had all 12 of her radio stations to pull all of the artist off of the their playlist.  Of course this seems evil, because Knowles is losing money.  Nevertheless, someone broke the contract and they'll have to pay regardless.

So there are more cases that we could analyze to give us examples to show us that in we always should have the proper understanding when collaborating and make sure we get permission to use any portion of creativity that we didn't create. Simple right?  Not in every situation, but at least you can cover yourself in the end so that you can have the proper back-up in case you ever come across a situation similar to ones above.  Go create!!