Monday, June 28, 2010

Leave my song alone, Lionel

Copyright laws can't possibly keep up with technology. The internet makes it so easy to get  so-callled "intellectual property" for free  that lawyers and legislators are going nuts trying to figure out how to make us pay for it.  One of the old laws, which still exists so far as I know, is that you can't copyright a title. I'm ambivalent about that one.  If I want to write a song called  "I love you, " I want to be free to do it without getting sued by the Cole Porter estate or anybody else who put music to those three little words.  On the other hand,  I hope that anybody trying to write another "Stardust" or a novel about "Gone with the wind" might get some legal flack from Hoagy Carmichael's people or the Margaret Mitchell estate. 

So where am I going with this? One of my favorite songs is "Dancing on the Ceiling."  Rodgers and Hart wrote it a long time ago. A great melody line, appealing harmonic progressions and  a lyric that is  some of the greatest  romantic imagery ever produced.

                           He dances overhead on the ceiling near my bed
                            in my sight through the night...

It ends with imagery and rhyme that gives me goosebumps.

                             I love my ceiling more since it is a dancing  floor
                             just for my love

Will I go to the federal pen for posting those words without permission from the copyright owners? Will Lionel Ritchie go scot free for his  rock song "Dancing on the ceiling" on which he steals Fred Astaire's ceiling dance  and Rodgers and Hart's title?   There oughta be a law.

2 comments:

  1. I tend to think ideas are out in space, and we just pick them up. Last one who gets it is a "rotten egg", or at least an unfortunate writer.
    So the others say, hey, you stole my idea, because I wrote it down first. All the while, it was just hanging out in space, until somebody took off with it.

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  2. Thanks for an interesting idea, Anita. I need to write a blog post about it.

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