The Music Industery
Queen & David Bowie vs Vanilla Ice
Now we can look at cases of copyright infringement in history. Many artist in the music industry are faced with accusations all the time regarding sound similarites
with other tracks from seperate artist. Examples of this include, Queen and David Bowie and their icon track "Under Pressure". The bass-line and main melody was said
to be copied by Vanilla Ice and his track 'Ice Ice Baby'. When listening to it you can tell it is certainly similar. In music production there is 'sampling' and there
stealing. This is why we have these laws to ensure people such as artist are compensated for their work.
Radiohead vs The Hollies vs Lana Del Rey
Another music example is Radioheads most popular track 'Creep' on one of their first albums 'Pablo Honey', was accused of sounding too similar to Albert Hammond's
ballad 'The Air That I Breathe'. Now this is an instance when an artist who is being accused actually accepts this, Hammond stated, "Radiohead agreed that they had
actually taken it. Because they were honest they weren't sued to the point of saying 'we want the whole thing'. So we ended up just getting a little piece of it." But
in 2018 Radiohead sued Lana Del Ray for her song 'Get Free' for sounding like 'Creep' as well. The critically renowned artist offered the band 40% of 'Get Free' but
Radiohead rejected, pushing for 100% of the royalties. This was stated by Lana Del Rey but Radioheads publishers denied taking legal action but requested for a writing
credit to be added to the song. The outcome of these events are currently disclosed but nonetheless interesting.
The Fashion Industery
Gucci vs Guess
Just like the Music Industry, Fashion has its fair-share of copycats that result in Copyright Infringemnt cases. Here we are taking a look at the Gucci vs Guess case
that happened back in 2009 where Gucci sued Guess for infringement involving Gucci's five trademarks including similar logos, designes and overall visual concepts that
were considered too similar for them. Guess had been infamous for copyright accusations for the past 12 years prior and had gotten away with it until this case in 2009
when Gucci initially asked for 221 million dollers in damages to their brand. You can obviously see the similarities when both products are compared to eachother and this
resulted in Gucci winning the case but only receiving 4.7 million dollers from Guess. But luckily the Guess corperation was banned from using most of their desings that
resemble a Gucci product in anyway.
Brand Copycats
Rip-off brands are the most prominent in the fashion industry and the toy industry because they are cheap to produce and are considered quite humerous in some instances.
Most of these products are produced in asian countries because their distribution laws and copyright laws are pretty loose there which results in brands such as Hike (Nike) or
NutMaster (Nutella). Occasionally the parent companies of these brands take the copycats to court but usually there is no point due to the quantity of production and other clones.
Here are some examples of similar brands immotating popular brands, see if you can guess which brands they are trying to copy :
- Dr.Bob
- Dr.Perky
- Sunbucks Coffee
- Prongles
- Sprunk
- Dave
- KatKot
- Hotdognalds