Perhaps you have not heard but the Estate of Marvin Gaye and his living relatives won a great victory against T.I., Pharell Williams and Robin Thicke for allegedly stealing parts of Gaye’s music to write the smash hit “Blurred Lines.” It should come as no surprise that an estate has a right to bring a law suit, nor should it surprise anyone that a celebrity estate could be mismanaged to the point where these type of suits are necessary to keep income going. The Estate has other songs on the chopping block too saying that William’s song “Happy” is peculiarly similar to “Aint that Peculiar”
- On Tuesday a jury ruled in favor of the Gayes following claims that Thicke, Williams and rapper T.I.’s 2013 hit stole from Gaye’s “Got to Give it up”
- The family was awarded more than 7 million dollars for using key elemts of the original R&B hit without permission. (Only Thicke and WIlliams as the song writers are ordered to pay the damages).
- The family is also seeking an injunction to stop the song from playing (your guess is as good as mine how valuable that injunction will be considering the fact that Metallica couldnt even get their own music from being played in the early 2000s, the internet has just simply made it impossible)
- The family claim they are not ready to pursue further litigation despite multiple members of the family claiming that “Aint it Peculiar” is oddly similar to Pharrel William’s “Happy”
- Thicke and others claim they wrote Blurred Lines themselves in under an hour, which the Gaye’s say is just evidence it was stolen.
Obviously an estate can hold property but can it hold melodies? How close is to close? This is a common question as now courts are looking to see if songs like “Stay with me’ rip of Tom Petty’s “Wont Back Down.”
In law school we always learned about the problem of the “dead hand” controlling property into the grave, now with the estate of R&B great Marvin Gaye saying hey the world cant listen to Blurred Lines, I have to ask, is this what they were talking about?!!
Also does the Estate of Marvin Gaye owe the estate of Muddy Waters anything for all he did to inspire Gaye? I doubt it.