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Prisoner composer loses copyright lawsuit

'On the Inside' loses a copyright claim against 'Christmas in Dixie.' But was it ripped off?

prisoner11Composer Alan Caswell, who wrote the memorable On the Inside theme to Prisoner has disappointingly lost a copyright case against Sony.

Caswell said the 1982 tune Christmas in Dixie by the American country rock band Alabama infringed the copyright of his 1979 hit and that Sony had failed to take appropriate steps to protect this copyright with their US counterpart.

Awkwardly, both artists are represented by Sony.

AAP reports Supreme Court Justice Michael Pembroke said there was no evidence any copyright infringement claim by Sony Australia would have been successful.

Alabama founding member Teddy Gentry said he lived on a farm and had little exposure to television when the song was composed.

He said that the first time he heard the plaintiff’s song was many years later, in the Nashville office of Sony US, after the plaintiff had made a complaint.

“I am satisfied that it is unlikely that he could have heard the plaintiff’s song by picking it up from the theme music of episodes of Prisoner,” Justice Pembroke said.

That’s despite original episodes of Prisoner airing in the US intact in the late 1970s.

The court of popular opinion would undoubtedly vote Caswell the better song and Lynne Hamilton as the better performance.

You can compare them both here.

4 Responses

  1. @Carta – you’re right. Often the judge hearing the case won’t have the necessary musical experience/expertise to make a properly informed decision. However, you can say that about most cases with a non-legal technical component; eg forensic pathology or computer hacking, which is why experts are called to advise them. No system is perfect tho’.

    @tvaddict – it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. For instance, in the Men At Work case you mention, the copyright owners were awarded only 5% of profits from the sale of the song.

  2. i was thinking the same thing Andrew, but they are quite similar, maybe the band were on tour somewhere the show was on & heard it on the show watching late night tv in their hotel room. Or maybe its just a co incidence *shrug*
    They need to be careful when someones lifes work & fortune are on the line though, look at the consequences of the Men At Work case. Ok so they kinda ripped off part of another song, but it was a traditional song & they probably didn’t know there even was a copyright on it. Unless theres an obvious rip off of someone elses work the cases should be thrown out of court. Anyway seems like these cases are a bit of a desperate cash grab.

  3. A lot of the time, it comes down to the judge’s attitude. A Belgian judge decided that Madonna had heard a demo of a song written by an obscure Belgian artist during a brief visit there in 1979, then used four bars from that demo in “Frozen” nearly 20 years later (!). Madonna stated that the four bars she was meant to have “stolen” were actually composed by Patrick Leonard (her co-writer), but the judge declared that the song could no longer be sold or played in Belgium, as it was an infringement of copyright. Several years later, another judge overturned the ruling and the song was declared an original composition again. Completely bizarre….!

  4. Prisoner was shown on US TV but it wasn’t nationwide.

    From memory it was only picked up by independent (non-network) channels in some capital city markets, e.g. KTLA11 in Los Angeles. So out in more remote or isolated markets it is probably possible that they’d never seen an episode of Prisoner during that early ’80s timeframe.

    And in a pre-internet and mostly pre-VCR era there wasn’t much chance for the show to spread far beyond its broadcast channels.

  5. The case wasn’t about plagiarism it was about Sony failing to protect the work of one of their artists…Sony shopped around till they got a musicologist report they liked – the first one said the two songs were too alike for it to be a coincidence. Judge said he didn’t even know what a musicologist did! Please…..also said how disappointed he was that he wouldn’t get to meet Teddy Gentry….Really??? How many free Sony CDs did you get Justice Pembroke?

  6. I always thought Achy Breaky Heart by Billy Ray Cyrus (1992) was a direct pinch from Tulsa Time by Eric Clapton (1978). No legal action was ever taken so perhaps I was the only one who could see the similarity.

  7. Yeah, they’re not the same. He might have a case if musical scores were random sequences of notes as there are some similarities.

    However, there are “rules” with regard to writing music and these are even more restrictive when you confine yourself to a musical style or genre. The vocal line, in particular, is used in so many different songs.

    Hay and Strykert lost because the flute riff was the same note structure as Kookaburra (I think they were in diff scales from memory).

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