Take Another Little Piece Of My Art Now, Baby

The music business wants to blow up copyright protection— and the Trump administration is backing it.

- Vernon Silver

Most Monday mornings, a cheery cabal of Hollywood-area music makers meets at a private club on the beach in Malibu. They call themselves the Composers Breakfast Club, and in recent months, over smoked salmon and fresh fruit, they’ve grappled with one of the biggest threats facing their vocation: a tsunami of copyright infringement lawsuits that has many of them worried they’ll be the next ones forced to pay out millions of dollars for stealing a catchy riff.

In the composers’ eyes, infringement claims have gone too far. At one breakfast in July, they reenacted the 2015 copyright trial in which a jury found Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had ripped off Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up for their hit Blurred Lines, resulting in a $5.3 million judgment. The tongue-in-cheek proceedings (overseen by a “judge” whose day job is overseeing music legal issues at Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Production) resulted in the opposite verdict: a jury of about 50 composers in attendance overwhelmingly found that the newer song didn’t exactly copy Gaye’s. In August a breakfast club member lamented the $2.8 million judgment against Katy Perry and her collaborators for copying a Christian rap song in her 2013 hit Dark Horse. The assembled composers shook their head in agreement that the jury of laypeople just hadn’t understood the difference between sounding similar and actually copying unique combinations of notes.