Setting Terrible Legal Precedents Just To Hammer on People We Don't Like
First, we got FCC title II regulation of the Internet because a lot of people hate Comcast and saw net neutering as the perfect way to stick it to Comcast. Now, we get a terrible copyright precedent because people don't like Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke.
The Internet appeared to rejoice that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke lost their lawsuit to the estate of Marvin Gaye over alleged copyright infringements in their mega hit song "Blurred Lines." It's not that the notoriously copyright-unfriendly Internet culture found religion on intellectual property privileges but that the Internet doesn't seem to like Robin Thicke. Fair enough. But as a number of commentators have noted, it's a silly reason to support such an awful ruling. And that ruling is awful even if you believe in relatively expansive intellectual property rights because it wasn't based on any copyright Marvin Gaye's estate owns on paper....
As the author notes, are we going to soon have competing claims (and lawsuits) claiming origination of the four chord progression?
