If a song is too blatantly stolen, it tends to end up in a court case.
Asides from these two, there are a number of cases of unlicenced samples resulting in loss of profit. The most unfortunate of these was that of
White Town, a band consisting of one man in the suburbs with a few keyboards and an
Amiga, who's superb #1 single
Your Woman contained a distinctive horn sample at the end of each verse. Music journalists pinned the sample down to a 1930's
Al Bowlly jazz track, tracked down Bowlly (or those in charge of his estate, not sure) and told him. He subsequently sued, taking most of the profits from the single, even though he would have certainly never heard of it unless the journos told him. The
Lo Fidelity Allstars also got in trouble for sampling
Cannonball by
The Breeders on their track
Disco Machinegun, having to recall all copies three days after the release (a new version without the sample was released as
Blisters on my Brain). I'm sure there are a million more cases like this, hence the creation of things like
The Droplift Project.
One of the problems with the nodes above is we're getting into
look and feel areas of musical copyright. To my knowledge, a band can sound as much as any other as they like, provided they don't actually
copy a tune. To use Wire as an example again, godawful
Britpoppers
Menswear had an (admittedly rather good) hit single with
Daydreamer, which aped Wire in almost every regard, right down to delivery. But it wasn't a Wire track, and wasn't an infringement of copyright. Similarly, the track
Rivers by
Sugar Ray, taken from the
Scream 2 soundtrack, sounds so much like
Weezer it's frankly uncanny, and any
=w= fan who uses Napster will notice this track mislabelled in a million MP3 collections (I think this is most likely a tribute though, especially seeing as =w='s creative force is called
Rivers Cuomo).
Things will clear up when the copyright on old tracks goes. Probably. Although
yerricde informs me that, in the US at least, this may never happen, thanks to the
sonny bono copyright extension act.
In light of Bones' closure of the node, some of the more subjective parts of this node have been painfully gouged out with a penknife. Just the facts, ma'am.