Multimillion plagiarism award upheld
A FEDERAL appeals court yesterday upheld a $5.3-million (R60-million) judgment against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copying a Marvin Gaye song to create their 2013 smash Blurred Lines.
By a 2-1 vote, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said Gaye’s 1977 song Got to Give It Up deserved broad copyright protection, and the March 2015 jury verdict in favour of Gaye’s three children could stand because there was “not an absolute absence of evidence” of similarity between the two songs.
Circuit Judge Milan Smith also upheld an award of 50% of future royalties from Blurred Lines to the Gayes.
He restored the jury finding that Interscope Records, part of Vivendi SA, and Clifford Harris, the rapper known as TI who added a verse to Blurred Lines, should not be liable.
Jurors had awarded the Gayes $7.4-million (R88-million), but US District Judge John Kronstadt reduced the sum to $5.3-million, while adding royalties.
Kronstadt had also said TI and Interscope should be liable, but the appeals court disagreed.
The Blurred Lines case has transfixed the music industry, prompting debate over the line between plagiarism and honouring works by popular artists like Gaye, whose songs also include I Heard It Through the Grapevine and What’s Going On. Gaye was fatally shot by his father in 1984 at the age of 44.
Yesterday’s decision prompted a strong dissent from Circuit Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, who said it let the Gayes “accomplish what no one has before: copyright a musical style”, and expanded the potential for further copyright litigation.
“That is the consequence of the majority’s uncritical deference to music experts,” she wrote.
Lawyers for the defendants did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
“We are thrilled,” the Gayes’ lawyer, Richard Busch, said. “The decision protects songwriters, and encourages new songwriters to create original works themselves.”
Gaye’s former wife, Jan, said the decision was a wonderful recognition of his creativity and the lasting value of one of his greatest songs.
Williams, whose songs include Happy, admitted in court to being a Gaye fan since childhood, but said Blurred Lines and Got to Give it Up were similar in genre only.
Thicke has in interviews acknowledged drawing on Gaye’s song, but maintained in sworn statements that he had exaggerated his contribution to Blurred Lines.
Song-theft lawsuits have proliferated in recent years.
This month, for example, Miley Cyrus was accused of stealing her 2013 hit We Can’t Stop from a 1988 work by a Jamaican songwriter.
Some artists like Ed Sheeran have settled, while, in contrast, Led Zeppelin persuaded a federal jury in June 2016 it had not stolen the opening guitar riff to Stairway to Heaven.