The hit song that Miley Cyrus 'twerked' on during the 2013 VMAs is under fire because of copyright issues. E! News reports that Gaye's grown children sued Thicke, Pharrell and producer Clifford Harris Jr. with claims saying that "Blurred Lines" borrowed way too much of its sound from Gaye's 1977 song "Got to Give It Up.
According to Billboard, U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt denied Thicke and Williams’ motion for summary judgement Thursday (October 30) citing that there is enough evidence to move forward with the family’s claim.
“The Gaye family have made a sufficient showing that elements of ‘Blurred Lines’ may be substantially similar to protected, original elements of ‘Got to Give It Up’,” he wrote. “Defendants have identified these with particularity for purposes of analytic dissection.”
Both parties' lawyers weighed in on the ruling.
“The ruling is not surprising given the extraordinary difficulty in prevailing at the summary judgment stage, especially where each side offers conflicting opinions from multiple musicologists,” said Howard King. “Although our musicologist, Sandy Wilbur, correctly testified that there are no two consecutive notes in the two songs that have the same pitch, the same duration, and the same placement in the measure, the Judge concluded that sufficient disagreement about other elements of the compositions warranted denial of the motion.”
He continued: “We are gratified that the ruling significantly limits the issues going forward by finding that the Gaye’s cannot assert any infringement claim for elements not included in the sheet music deposited with the copyright office, which effectively eliminates 5 of their 8 claimed similarities. The jury will now decide this case on the merits, limited to what is in the written composition, without being influenced by the sound recordings. Since the compositions at issue are completely different, we remain confident of prevailing at trial.”
Even with that being said, the Gaye family's lawyer was not convinced and felt indifferent about the case, “We believe the evidence of copying of Marvin Gaye’s legendary work ‘Got To Give It Up’ is overwhelming and now look forward to trying the case,” said Richard Busch. “We also disagree with Mr. King’s assessment that the Court ruled that there will be any limitation on what the jury considers at the trial, which involves a different analysis than what the Court analyzes on a motion for summary judgment.”
According to an article in Forbes by Jess Collens, he said that if the song were written at a later time and was covered by the more recent copyright act, many of the different elements upon which the Gaye camp are claiming infringement would be part of the court’s determination, and that would appear to have been helpful to their side.
"But as it stands now, after this decision, the review is going to be on a much narrower basis. This could mean in theory that copying will not be deemed 'infringing,' because of the law that applied to this work" he continued
