14
Edited by
Rebecca Penty and
James E. Ellis PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY 731; PHOTO: ALAMY. DATA: ASCAPTake Another Little Piece
Of My Art Now, Baby
The music business wants to blow up copyright protection—
and the Trump administration is backing itMost Monday mornings, a cheery cabal of
Hollywood-area music makers meets at a pri-
vate club on the beach in Malibu. They call them-
selves the Composers Breakfast Club, and in
recent months, over smoked salmon and fresh
fruit, they’ve grappled with one of the biggest
threats facing their vocation: a tsunami of copy-
right infringement lawsuits that has many of them
worried they’ll be the next ones forced to pay out
millions of dollars for stealing a catchy riff.
In the composers’ eyes, infringement claims
have gone too far. At one breakfast in July, theyreenacted the 2015 copyright trial in which a jury
found Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke had
ripped off Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up for their
hit Blurred Lines, resulting in a $5.3 million judg-
ment. The tongue-in-cheek proceedings (overseen
by a “judge” whose day job is overseeing music
legal issues at Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Production) resulted in the opposite verdict: a jury
of about 50 composers in attendance overwhelm-
ingly found that the newer song didn’t exactly
copy Gaye’s. In August a breakfast club member
lamented the $2.8 million judgment against KatyB U S I N E S S