Most of you are likely familiar with this already, but I just wanted to share an interesting and fairly recent music-industry copyright issue that arose between the singer Olivia Rodrigo and the band Paramore.
The songs at issue here are Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” and Paramore’s “Misery Business.” I’ve hyperlinked the songs on YouTube. After listening to them, I do admit that the choruses of each song do have a similar “vibe“, for lack of a better word. However, I am not entirely sure if I believe that Good 4 U is “substantially similar” to Misery Business to warrant a copyright infringement under Canadian copyright law.
To begin, the lyrics for the chorus of Misery Business are as follows:
Whoa, I never meant to brag
But I got him where I want him now
Whoa, it was never my intention to brag
To steal it all away from you now
The lyrics for Good 4 U are:
Well, good for you, you look happy and healthy
Not me, if you ever cared to ask
Good for you, you’re doing great out there without me, baby
God, I wish that I could do that
I’ve lost my mind, I’ve spent the night
Crying on the floor of my bathroom
But you’re so unaffected, I really don’t get it
But I guess good for you
It seems to me that the lyrics of each song address polar opposite love issues. In Misery Business, the singer seems to be describing ‘stealing’ someone away from someone else and ‘gaining’ a love interest, while Good 4 U appears to be describing the ‘loss’ of a lover. Is singing about love in general Copyrightable? Absolutely not.
Moving on to the melodic aspects of the song, according to songbmp.com, “Misery Business is a positive song … with a tempo of 173 BPM. It can also be used half-time at 87 BPM. The track runs 3 minutes and 32 seconds long with a C♯/D♭ key and a major mode. It has … a time signature of 4 beats per bar,” while “Good 4 U is a positive song … with a tempo of 169 BPM. It can also be used half-time at 85 BPM. The track runs 2 minutes and 58 seconds long with a F♯/G♭ key and a minor mode. It has … a time signature of 4 beats per bar.”
So, Misery Business is slightly faster, with 4 additional beats per minute compared to Good 4 U, and the songs appear to be in different keys. Further, Misery Business has a “major mode”, while Good 4 U has a “minor mode.” I’m not trained in music and do not know the significance of this, so I suppose this is where those expert witnesses mentioned in Cinar and Mohan would come in handy. However, taking the “connector” point of view of creativity, I would argue that even if the chord progressions were/are similar (particularly in the chorus, as Adam Neely points out in his video analyzing the two songs), Rodrigo’s take on the chord progressions is a completely valid form of remixing. As Adam Neely notes, overlaying “Good 4 U” overtop Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”, and “Misery Business” overtop Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” shows these songs are also incredibly similar. Neely states at 6:58 that this is because there are only so many chord progressions and diatonic melodies which may work with certain progressions, and certain progressions have a “tendency to infer certain melodies, certain target tones – the places notes want to go” and “there are realistically only a certain number of melodies that might be composed”.
As for the “vibe” of the two songs, is singing in an angsty fashion about love protected by copyright law? I would think not – otherwise a lot of ’90s and early 2000s pop punk bands would be in trouble. I would argue that this genre and style of song would fall within the public domain.
Of course, per Cinar, an analysis of copyright infringement must be holistic rather than piecemeal. However, in my opinion, even with the combination of song “topic” (love), arguably similar chorus melodies (though in my opinion still different enough), and similar angsty “vibe”, this is not enough to justify a finding of copyright infringement. I wonder if a public interest argument could be made against limiting the publication of songs which have such combinations of similar elements. Would the argument that ‘copyrighting song elements to this extent results in unreasonable stifling of creativity and a reduction of public enjoyment’ have a leg to stand on in court?
Interestingly and as an aside, some sources indicate that Paramore and Rodrigo had communicated prior to the release of Good 4 U, and that the retroactive acknowledgment by Rodrigo of Paramore’s song writers in the credits for Good 4 U is “actually [for] an interpolation — which is essentially an element of a previously recorded song re-recorded and incorporated into a new song.” From listening, I am still not quite sure what “element” this is that wouldn’t be part of the public domain, but I would be curious to know what you all think!
As another aside, I asked Professor Festinger if “interpolation” is a concept in Canadian copyright law, and while he could not find any mention of interpolation in Canadian cases, he noted that “it is a common definition of a way to use music”, and that he “can’t see any reason Canadian copyright law would not acknowledge the concept if the right case came along.”
Communications Law