By now you probably know that Robin Thicke and Pharrell had to pay the mind-blowing sum of $7.3 million to Marvin Gaye’s family after a jury found them guilty of plagiarism, as their huge hit ‘Blurred Lines’ was found just too similar to Gaye’s ‘Got To Give it Up’.
Will this give a lesson to all these people who try to recycle old successful music recipes? We’ll see but this is not the end of the story and the troubles for the famous Thicke-Williams duo! According to CBS News, after their victory, the legal battle of Gaye’s family is not over, they also find that Pharrell’s mega hit ‘Happy’ is bearing a similar sound to Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’:
‘I’m not going to lie. I do think they sound alike,’ declared Nona Gaye, Marvin’s 40-year-old daughter, who added that she wasn’t thinking about the legal implications right now because, saying ‘We’re not in that space.’ ‘We’re just in the moment today and we’re satisfied,’ added Janis Gaye, Marvin’s ex-wife. ‘I heard the mash-ups — but I didn’t really need to hear them’ she said, ‘I know ‘Ain’t That Peculiar’ and I’ve heard ‘Happy.’’ Ouch! Does it mean they are eventually gonna sue Pharrell Williams for this song in the future? They are gonna make the guy swallow his hat! After all, they won one time, and they probably feel very confident about a second victory.
No matter if you agree or not with the result of the lawsuit, there is a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism and it happens all the time when I listen to new songs, they very often remind me about another song, but do I know music enough to decide if it is total plagiarism? But I can’t defend Pharrell here, the songs have definitively the same feeling than the famous Motown hits and the fact that he said he wrote the song in an hour didn’t help, ‘When I first heard that he had said he did it in an hour, my first thought was, ‘That’s because it was already done in 1977, ‘declared Janis to CBS. ‘So why would it take you any longer than 20 minutes… to redo something that had already been done 40 years earlier?’
She has a very good point here, however the Gaye Family may appear a bit too hungry, Rolling Stone reports that their lawyer also wants to stop the sales of ‘Blurred Lines’:
‘We’ll be asking the court to enter an injunction prohibiting the further sale and distribution of ‘Blurred Lines’ unless and until we can reach an agreement with those guys on the other side about how future monies that are received will be shared,’ said Richard Busch, Gaye family’s attorney. ‘We’ll be doing that in about a week or so.’
Another thing that looks very bad for Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke is their preemptive lawsuit! Do you remember about this? I didn’t but the two men (as well as Clifford Harris) sued ‘Funkadelic and the estate of Marvin Gaye over ‘Blurred Lines’ in 2013, claiming that the song was ‘starkly different’ from Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ or Funkadelic’s ‘Sexy Ways’. In other words, they were looking for a lawsuit and this preemptive thing looks like a complete admittance of their plagiarism… Is it the beginning of the end for Pharrell? I wonder how many songs he stole…