Yahoo, Amazon And Apple Dragged Into Copyright Infringement Lawsuit For Twenty Year Old Song

from the it's-tricky dept

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A few weeks back, we wrote about the story of how 1970s one-hit-wonder The Knack had suddenly noticed that Run DMC had sampled their 1979 song "My Sharona" in Run DMC's 1986 hit "It's Tricky." So, even though this was twenty years after that had happened, they decided to sue for copyright infringement . Perhaps the royalties on that one hit were finally starting to dwindle. Of course, as we noted at the time, there is a statute of limitations to deal with: apparently it's three years. So, how do you get around that? Easy. You just sue for every time the song was purchased in the past three years. And, of course, why stop at suing just Run DMC? Why not sue the online retailers who sold the song in the past three years. Stephen Bryant has looked deeper into the lawsuit and found that Yahoo, Apple and Amazon are also charged with copyright infringement in the case , for having the gall to sell a popular music hit from 1986 that The Knack just noticed sampled a portion of its song. If you're wondering why it's only the online retailers that are being sued (I certainly am), the reasoning from the lawyer involved is that: "because they copied and sold the infringing work." This, of course, makes no sense. They copied and sold the song because the labels that believed they had the right to it, gave it to them to do so. That's the exact same way that those labels gave brick-and-mortar stores, such as Wal-Mart (who is not being sued) the song in CD format. They "copied" the song onto the CD and then "sold" it. The more you read about this case, the more it sounds like a desperate attempt to get some extra publicity for a band well past its prime.