Posted on: Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Song sleuth nabs the ripoffs
By Jeanne Anne Naujeck
The Tennessean
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Music City USA is best known for its creators — writers, musicians, singers and producers — who spend their days building and combining musical elements to make hit songs.
Gannett News Service Meet Earl Spielman, forensic musicologist. That's a term he coined in the 1980s to describe his work: comparing songs, note for note.
He's a sort of sleuth hired by record and publishing companies, advertising agencies and artists to determine if anything in one song — phrasing, a chord progression, even a bass line — sounds too much like something already copyrighted.
Spielman's ears and professional opinion are in demand because a hit song can generate millions of dollars, especially if it takes on a new life through use in commercials.
Clients of Copyright Infringement Consultants pay him to help avoid legal trouble — or get out of it. Those clients include companies such as Warner Bros., Curb Records, Macy's, Visa, MasterCard, Pepsi, Motorola and Ogilvy & Mather.
Intellectual property litigation is "the sport of kings," Spielman said. "You're not going to sue someone for copyright infringement unless there's a lot of money at stake."
Most of his work is for ad agencies that want original music in a commercial that doesn't sound too much like a well-known song.
That's where Spielman comes in.
He'll get the two tracks in MP3 format and compare the new jingle with the original song, which he does by ear, by transcribing the works and, in rare cases, by taking the masters into the studio and isolating each track.
He identifies those elements that are similar and then judges whether they're unique to the song, or common to the musical genre. If he feels an element is unique to the original song, then he'll advise the client to tweak it to avoid potential copyright infringement.
If he greenlights the new work, chances are it will stand up in court. "I have a good track record with the people I work with," he said.
Most of Spielman's work is pre-emptive; litigation is relatively rare. But Spielman has worked on numerous cases involving high-profile artists, from Hank Williams Jr. to Dr. Dre.
His best-known job was for Fantasy Records in its 1988 lawsuit against former Creedence Clearwater Revival singer John Fogerty.
Fantasy, the copyright holder, alleged that Fogerty ripped off his own 1970 Creedence hit "Run Through the Jungle" when he wrote the similar-sounding 1985 song "Old Man Down the Road" for his solo album and sold it to a different publishing company.
Spielman said it was essentially the same song. But the jury found for Fogerty. Artist advocates at the time hailed it as "a victory for the creative process." But Spielman said the real issue was obscured by star power.
"It was wrong for him to sell it to another company," he said.
Spielman, a composer and arranger who began playing violin at age 5, spent his first 10 years in Nashville as a record producer, but in the early 1980s, he saw changes in the business and decided to build a company around himself.
Business took off after Anheuser-Busch retained him for a 1984 case against a writer who claimed Budweiser owed him after it stopped using his jingle "When you say Budweiser, you've said it all." The judge quoted Spielman by name in the written opinion, which found in favor of Budweiser. "From that point on, anybody who was involved with intellectual property cases involving music had access to my name," Spielman said.
But it's also home to a man who makes his living picking them apart.
Earl Spielman, who works out of his Nashville home office, is hired by record companies and musical artists to determine if anything in a new song may infringe on someone else's copyright.
