Derivative musical works and copyright č il titolo di un recente post di Jim Lippard il quale esordisce dicendo:
I didn’t realize that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was a derivative work, with the main guitar line closely resembling that in Spirit’s “Taurus” — and Spirit used to open for Led Zeppelin. (Apparently a lot of Led Zeppelin’s songs are derivative works.)
Altro esempio, secondo Lippard, sarebbe il brano Come As You Are dei Nirvana e, non riuscendo a chiarire se le attinenze musicali rilevate siano volute o accidentali, su di esse l’autore recupera un racconto scritto nel 1983 dall’autore di fantascienza Spider Robinson, Melancholy Elephants, in cui la battaglia della giovane protagonista porta a impedire l’approvazione di un provvedimento sorprendentemente simile al Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, nella realtā varato quindici anni dopo. E Lippard conclude:
In 2004, arguments over the practice of sampling music came to a head, when the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that no sampling could take place without a license — not even for a 1.5-second, three-note guitar riff that N.W.A.’s 1990 song “100 Miles and Runnin'” sampled from Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” This decision led to a protest in the form of a collection of songs composed solely of that sample.