Songs that are blatantly stolen from other songs (idea)

If a song is too blatantly stolen, it tends to end up in a court case.

• Connection by Elastica - Proven to be damn near identical to Three Girl Rhumba by late 70's post-punk group Wire, EMI settled out of court to avoid too much bad publicity on Elastica's behalf.
• Whatever by Oasis - Oasis are most commonly accused of ripping off The Beatles, but not in this case. This track seemed hauntingly familiar to anyone who'd seen Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, and for good reason, as it turned out upon not-very-close analysis to have note-for-note the same tune as How Sweet to be an Idiot by Neil Innes, which Innes (who was good friends with Eric Idle) sings at the piano during the show. Oasis were forced to give basically almost all the money from the single to Innes, and it was never released on an album.
• Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice - Very obviously took the bass & piano section from Queen's Under Pressure, which was written by Queen and David Bowie. The build-up for legal action began, but again it was settled out of court.

Asides from these two, there are a number of cases of unlicenced samples resulting in loss of profit. The most unfortunate of these was that of White Town, a band consisting of one man in the suburbs with a few keyboards and an Amiga, who's superb #1 single Your Woman contained a distinctive horn sample at the end of each verse. Music journalists pinned the sample down to a 1930's Al Bowlly jazz track, tracked down Bowlly (or those in charge of his estate, not sure) and told him. He subsequently sued, taking most of the profits from the single, even though he would have certainly never heard of it unless the journos told him. The Lo Fidelity Allstars also got in trouble for sampling Cannonball by The Breeders on their track Disco Machinegun, having to recall all copies three days after the release (a new version without the sample was released as Blisters on my Brain). I'm sure there are a million more cases like this, hence the creation of things like The Droplift Project.

One of the problems with the nodes above is we're getting into look and feel areas of musical copyright. To my knowledge, a band can sound as much as any other as they like, provided they don't actually copy a tune. To use Wire as an example again, godawful Britpoppers Menswear had an (admittedly rather good) hit single with Daydreamer, which aped Wire in almost every regard, right down to delivery. But it wasn't a Wire track, and wasn't an infringement of copyright. Similarly, the track Rivers by Sugar Ray, taken from the Scream 2 soundtrack, sounds so much like Weezer it's frankly uncanny, and any =w= fan who uses Napster will notice this track mislabelled in a million MP3 collections (I think this is most likely a tribute though, especially seeing as =w='s creative force is called Rivers Cuomo).

Things will clear up when the copyright on old tracks goes. Probably. Although yerricde informs me that, in the US at least, this may never happen, thanks to the sonny bono copyright extension act.

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In light of Bones' closure of the node, some of the more subjective parts of this node have been painfully gouged out with a penknife. Just the facts, ma'am.