Copyright Culture and Remixing

In the beginning of the semester, we watched a couple movies about remix culture and how different songs get remixed and at what point that remixing becomes just plain copying. Both sides of the arguments made good points about the topic and copyright. It got me thinking about songs in specific and how some sound really similar and whether or not those violate any copyright laws. The songs Under Pressure by Queen and Ice, Ice, Baby by Vanilla Ice. If you’ve heard both of these songs, you know that they sound exactly the same in the beginning and continue to have the same beat and chords played throughout the entirety of the songs. The biggest difference is obviously the singers and the lyrics, but if you listen to the songs without the vocals, they sound almost identical in many parts of the songs. Does this count as a copyright violation? Under Pressure was released eight years before Ice, Ice, Baby, so do they have the right to make a claim about copyright violation? There are many other songs that sound similar in the beginning, to the point where if you hear it on the radio, you can’t tell which song it actually is until the lyrics start. It is interesting to me that the main argument against copyrighting is that there are only so many chords and notes in music and there are only so many combinations to make, so after a while, it makes sense that artists have run out of combinations and just reuse some from other songs. However, there is new music coming out all the time and there are plenty of songs that I hear that don’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard before. Artists are constantly coming up with new sounds and ways to make music. So which argument it true then? Is the argument that artists are running out of combinations of notes to make new music false? Or is it just that the “new” music coming out is a rendition of older music that just isn’t popular so it seems like it’s new and never been heard before?

Just another interesting thing that I wanted to note was the experience I have had with hearing songs and identifying them with a certain artist, only to find out that they are not the original singers of the song. This happened years ago with the song “Our Lips Are Sealed”. I heard this song sung by Hillary and Haley Duff, back when Lizzie McGuire was still on TV and Hillary Duff was in her prime. I had always thought that the song was written and first performed by them. Turns out, that song came out in the early 80’s and was first sung by The Go-Go’s! That was before I was born, so I naturally associated the song with the singers of my time rather than an older version. How often does this happen that artists sing a song and even produce it on an album, but it’s not their original song and many people don’t know that? Do artists that cover other artists’ songs have to pay a certain royalty on the song if they make money through something like iTunes or album sales? I think that is an interesting twist on copyright as well.