Whipped Cream Difficulties

• “… on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.”
• Wow. “YMCA” is 35 years old?
• Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!
• “He added, however, that he is thinking of prohibiting the Village People — the band still exists and is touring this month and next, though with largely different members — from singing any of his songs, at least in the United States.” Is this an example of copyright being used for the public good?
• “‘We hired this guy,’ Stewart L. Levy, a lawyer for the companies that controlled the Village People song catalog, said last year. ‘He was an employee. We gave them the material and a studio to record in and controlled what was recorded, where, what hours and what they did.’ Eventually, though, that argument was withdrawn. If the ‘work for hire’ doctrine can’t be made to apply to a prefab group like the Village People, it stands little chance of surviving a test against other artists who emerged in the 1970s and who always had a much greater degree of autonomy, like Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Parliament-Funkadelic.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 11th, 2013 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Clippings, Cops, Law, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.