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Sony/ATV settles with Gaye family over ‘Blurred Lines’

By | Published on Tuesday 14 January 2014

Robin Thicke

Sony/ATV has settled its legal dispute with the Gaye family over Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’, possibly because Marvin Gaye’s children raised issues around the music publisher’s market dominance in their litigation.

That’s not something Sony/ATV chiefs want debated too much in the public arena, they having successfully speeded through their mega-acquisition of the EMI publishing company with minimum fuss in 2012 while everyone was distracted with Universal’s takeover of the EMI record company.

As previously reported, the Gaye family have accused misogyny-pop maestro Robin ‘incredibly’ Thicke of lifting from Marvin Gaye track ‘Got To Give It Up’ for his slightly controversial hit ‘Blurred Lines’. Partly because the Thickster once told GQ: “Pharrell [Williams] and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favourite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that’ … we literally wrote the song in about a half hour and recorded it”.

The legal battle between the Gaye family and Thicke himself, and his publisher Universal, is ongoing, but Sony/ATV was pulled into the squabble too because it represents Williams in the publishing domain. Moreover, Sony/ATV/EMI also manages the song copyrights in ‘Got To Give It Up’, which added an extra dimension to the case. The Gaye family said that the EMI publisher had failed in its duties, first by not spotting that ‘Blurred Lines’ lifted from the Gaye track, and then by putting inappropriate pressure on the family not to sue and hinder “the goose that laid the golden egg” (ie the Thicke/Williams hit).

The Gaye’s lawsuit added that, by now controlling nearly a third of the songs market since the merger of the Sony/ATV and EMI publishing businesses, conflict of interests such as this were likely to occur within the company relatively regularly, and this was an example of Sony/ATV being unable to properly handle such a problem. It said: “The EMI defendants have proven that they cannot be trusted to remain neutral and impartial, and that they are unworthy of the level of trust and professional conduct which is required of a copyright administrator”.

Tough talking. But Sony/ATV now won’t be forced to defend its abilities to cope with conflicts between songwriters across their vast catalogues having reached a settlement with the Gaye family, terms of which are not known. Though, if the Thicke side of the dispute does get to court (which it probably won’t, he’s not that thick), then the Sony publisher might still be called to explain why it was so certain there was no lifting from ‘Give It Up’ in the creation of ‘Lines’.



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