Screwed By The Lawyers / Music

• In 1991, singer-songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan sued rapper Biz Markie for using an uncleared sample of his song "Alone Again (Naturally)". The case (Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner (Bros.) Records Inc.) was settled for $1.7 million, and Markie's song "Alone Again" was pulled from circulation.
• Redd Kross bassist Steven Shane McDonald added a bass track to the entirety of The White Stripes' 2001 album White Blood Cells, then put MP3s of the whole project (entitled Redd Blood Cells) online. Later on, after some kind of "arrangement," only the first track remains online.
  • Speaking of Redd Kross... they were originally named "Red Cross" with The Red Cross logo as the band's logo. They were requested to stop by the International Red Cross. ^note This, however, is a little different from most legal "dibs-calling" as the IRC isn't thinking in terms of marketability, but instead in terms of survivability — the Red Cross is a protected symbol, whose main function is to mark people, places, and things involved in wartime medical care and which are therefore not legitimate military targets. The going theory is that if the symbol is used willy-nilly there's a risk that it will be stripped of its meaning and that could lead to incidents where medical targets are fired upon. This is also, incidentally, why most peacetime ambulances and EMTs today (other than Red Cross-affiliated ones) do not bear the symbol, at least in the United States.
• George Jones's 1989 single "The King Is Gone (So Are You)" was originally titled "Ya Ba Da Ba Do (So Are You)" (an obvious reference to The Flintstones), but had to be re-titled due to a request from Hanna-Barbera. The single's label was hastily edited with stickers, deejays were told to refer to the song only by its altered title, and each single was also issued with a warning that Hanna-Barbera did not endorse the song.
• Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines"...grab some food, this is gonna take a while. Initially, Thicke and co-writers/co-performers Pharrell Williams and Clifford "T.I." Harris sued the family of the late singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye for alleging that "Blurred Lines" had infringed on the copyright of "Got to Give It Up." Thicke and Williams both claimed to the public that while the song was indeed an influence in writing "Blurred Lines," it did not copy the song outright and that it only replicated the groove and feel of it.
  The song was allegedly written at the recording studio in less than an hour. However, a year later, Thicke admitted in a deposition released by The Hollywood Reporter that he had never actually had any part in the song's composition, citing high drug and alcohol influence at the time and that Williams penned the song entirely. Ultimately, the Gaye family countersued the two artists for copyright infringement. T.I., meanwhile, was vindicated when he testified that he recorded his vocals after Thicke and Williams and that he played no part in songwriting despite being credited for it. On March 10, 2015, the Gaye family won the suit, and both Thicke and Williams were ordered to pay $7.4 million in damages to the family.
• The original packaging for Weezer's "Buddy Holly" single was a childhood photo of Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo with an unidentified woman sitting next to him. When the band realized her likeness was being used without permission, the original packaging was recalled and replaced with another childhood photo of Cuomo with his brother, Leaves.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic performed a parody of James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" called "You're Pitiful", and intended to release it as the lead single to the album Straight Outta Lynwood. However, after recording completed, Atlantic Records (Blunt's label) prohibited Yankovic from releasing the song, despite Blunt giving prior approval to writing and liking the parody. Legally Atlantic had no authority to block the release; parody is well established as being protected speech and no permission is required. Yankovic seeks permission from the original artists of songs he wants to parody simply as a courtesy. It was later released as a free downloadable single on MySpace and has played it in concert, but it has never seen a general release to this day. In a case of Tropes Are Not Bad, this setback led to Al crafting "White & Nerdy" in its stead, and the song has since gone on to become one of his biggest hits. Amusingly, the "White & Nerdy" video features a massive Take That! to Atlantic in which Al vandalizes the Atlantic Records Wikipedia page with the words "YOU SUCK!", something his fans actually proceeded to do following the video's release.
  • Al has also noted at one point MGM, which had obtained the distributing rights for his movie, UHF after Orion went bankrupt, had sent him a cease-and-desist letter for playing clips at his live shows. He's since seemed to have had the legal matters settled.
  • He tried to include the song "Polkamon" from Pokémon 2000 in his career-spanning boxset, but Nintendo refused to license the song.
• All modern prints of the Conan the Barbarian (1982) soundtrack exclude the track "Tower of Set" (also sometimes titled "Stealing the Eye of the Serpent") because it's basically the Clemencic Consort's "Cantiga 166" with eerie female vocals tacked on.
• Sufjan Stevens' album Illinois! initially had Superman on the cover art. A few weeks after the album's release, the record label, Asthmatic Kitty, realized they'd never gotten the rights to use Supe's likeness, so they pulled all unsold copies before DC Comics could sue them. Fortunately, AK worked out a deal with DC: they could sell the copies that had already been printed, but subsequent printings wouldn't include Superman. Some new covers had empty sky where Supes had been, while others had a bunch of balloons in his place ^note the balloons are still a subtle, non-infringing Shout-Out - they're red and blue like Superman's costume, and the way they're positioned suggests an "Up, Up and Away!" pose, with the balloons themselves as a head and clenched fists and the strings trailing behind like a cape . The initial vinyl pressing had a balloon sticker obscuring Supes. And the 10th anniversary remaster of the album substituted another superhero: Blue Marvel—and this time, AK made sure to get permission from Marvel Comics beforehand.
• After Doro Pesch realized she was the only original member of Warlock left, she intended to continue using the name for what was essentially now her backing band as a solo artist, but the band's former manager Peter Zimmermann sued for the name rights and won. Pesch began using "Doro" as her touring name, though she eventually regained the rights to the name "Warlock" in 2011.
• Peg + Cat's first album originally had a beautiful cover art that was a parody of the The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover art. However, later releases replaced it with much more generic and dull cover art. It's pretty much assumed that this happened.
• The KLF are no stranger to this, given that many of their songs sampled other well-known songs. However, their most well-known run-in with lawyers was with the track "The Queen and I", whose title is not only a nod to The King and I, but they also heavily sampled ABBA's "Dancing Queen". After some fierce courtroom battles with ABBA's lawyers, they were forced to recall all unsold copies of the album the song is on from all store shelves. They then went to Sweden to try to gain an audience with ABBA to seek forgiveness. Failing to do so, they burnt several cartons of the unsold vinyls in a field and dumped the rest into the North Sea.^note this also had the side effect of making any copies sold a collectors' piece, as the only way to get the song now is through the underground and getting the song legally is impossible.
• This is what ended up wrecking The Verve. The song "Bitter Sweet Symphony", which propelled them to mainstream fame in 1997, caught the attention of Allen Klein, former manager of The Rolling Stones and the owner of their pre-1971 work, sued them for overuse of a sample of Andrew Oldham Orchestra's version of "The Last Time". The Verve lost and was forced to change the writing credits to Jagger/Richards as well as give the Stones all of their earnings made from the song. They would end up flailing for another year before announcing their breakup. In May 2019 Richard Ashcroft, the lead singer of The Verve, announced that he had reached a deal with The Rolling Stones' current manager and Allen Klein's son (who inherited the publishing rights after Allen's death in 2009) which saw Jagger/Richards waiving their credit on the song and signing over all rights to The Verve.
• A tweet from Donald Trump featuring a video of a mock movie trailer for his 2020 re-election campaign was taken down after Warner Bros. complained over its unauthorized use of the score from The Dark Knight Rises. In Trump's defense, the video wasn't made by his campaign and it's not clear that he knew the score was copyrighted, but still.
• Sabaton:
  • After The Art of War came out, a Polish fan made a homemade music video for the song "40:1" and uploaded it to YouTube. It was removed for copyright infringement, but not before getting a few gazillion hits and singlehandedly netting the band a huge Polish fandom. It even inspired a filmmaker descendant of Captain Władysław Raginis, the actual Polish army commander at the Battle of Wizna, to get together with the band to film an official video on the battlefield. To cap it off, Sabaton reuploaded the fan-made video to their own YouTube channel.
  • The Sabaton History video for "Talvisota" got a copyright strike from Finland's National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI). It turned out it was collateral damage from a copyright dispute between the agency and the Reuters archive (from which Sabaton History had licensed some footage), and the strike was withdrawn a couple of weeks later.
• John Denver's publishing company lawsuit over New Order's "Run 2", a remixed version of the track "Run" from their Technique album, over its alleged similarity to Denver's "Leaving on a Jet Plane", killed the single's commercial momentum, and is likely the reason that that version of the song was left off of compilations, even after the band settled out of court and gave Denver a writing credit.
• John Fogerty's dispute with Fantasy Records owner Saul Zaentz kept him from launching a solo career in earnest until the 1980s, and then Zaentz sued him over the similarity of his solo hit, "The Old Man down the Road" to Creedence's "Run Through the Jungle", a song Fogerty wrote, since Zantz held the publishing rights to the Creedence catalog. Fogerty ultimately prevailed in court.
• Alternative R&B artist Santogold changed her stage name to Santigold after receiving threats of legal action from Santo Victor Rigatuso (aka late-night TV marketing icon Santo Gold).
• "Doin' Time" by Sublime includes lyrical references to George Gershwin's "Summertime", as well as sampling a Cover Version of the song by jazz flautist Herbie Mann - in order to release the song with the sample intact, they had to agree to change every instance of the Title Drop to "Summertime". This complicated the release of the song, as they'd already recorded it with the "doin' time" lyric, and lead vocalist Bradley Nowell died months before the album was set to be released. Michael Happoldt, a friend and producer of the band, ended up singing the parts of the song that legally needed to be dubbed over - the song title remained the same, even though now the lyric "doin' time" appeared nowhere in the song. A 2006 deluxe reissue of the album would restore the originally intended lyric to the song.
• Le Grand Magistery was forced to recall all copies of Momus' 1998 album The Little Red Songbook after electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos sued him for $22 million regarding the song "Walter Carlos", which postulated that Wendy, a transgender woman, could travel back in time to marry her pre-transition self, Walter, once time travel was possible. The case was settled out of court, with Momus agreeing to remove the song from subsequent editions of the CD and owing $30,000 in legal fees (which he paid by having 30 fans pay a fee of $1,000 for songs about them on his next album, Stars Forever).
• In the year 2000, German trance group Fragma released "Toca's Miracle", a mashup of their earlier single "Toca Me" with the vocals of "I Need a Miracle" by English singer Coco. It became an international hit, reaching #1 in the UK. However, it turns out that Coco never received any royalties for her vocal contribution due to a sample mix-up by record label Positiva, thus leading to a lawsuit against them in 2015. The original version of the song is currently blacklisted from all streaming platforms, and physical copies are unobtainable by legal means.
• In 2022, Swedish indie pop singer-songwriter Jens Lekman had two of his records discontinued, due to legal issues with samples. The first was a compilation of EPs called "Oh You're So Silent, Jens", from 2005. The other was his second album in 2007, called "Night Falls Over Kortedala". Lekman had to re-record both records, and were reissued respectively as The Cherry Trees are Still in Blossom and The Linden Trees are Still in Blossom.
• In 2007, the South Korean pop singer Ivy released the song "Sonata of Temptation". Though the song itself was popular, the music video was taken down and she and her company was sued by Square Enix because it recreated footage of Tifa and Loz's fight from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children with some minor variations. The director included a disclaimer, but that was not enough.
• "Addictive", the debut single of Truth Hurts (AKA Shari Watson), can no longer be sold or performed anywhere after label Aftermath and parent company Interscope records were sued by Lata Mangeskhar, whose vocals were heavily sampled on the track. As this was Watson's biggest hit, and her next big hit had the misfortune of being a collaboration with R. Kelly right before he was accused of sex crimes, the lawsuit pretty much doomed Watson to obscurity.
• The original version of Fall Out Boy's song "What A Catch, Donnie" from Folie a Deux includes a cameo by Elvis Costello. When the song was included on the band's first Greatest Hits Album, Believers Never Die, the lines were now performed by lead singer Patrick Stump as Costello's record label refused to clear his appearance before the album's release date.