John Fogerty was once sued for plagiarizing himself… thank you intellectual property.

The idea of “intellectual property” is a strange one; the notion that some one can control the copyright for something that is not tangible seems a little out of the ordinary. To fully understand what the term “intellectual property” I first revisited the lecture video and then, to further clarify, I went to www.dictionary.com and researched its definition. According to the on-line dictionary the term “intellectual property” means, “a product of the intellect that has commercial value, including copyrighted property such as literary or artistic works, and ideational property, such as patents, appellations of origin, business methods, and industrial processes.” With this definition in mind I began to re-think my personal opinion on the subject and discovered that “intellectual property” indeed had a purpose however that did not mean that it was not still rather odd.

When doing research for the topic of intellectual property I came across an article detailing a court case involving the singer songwriter John Fogerty and his encounter with intellectual property. In 1985 the singer/songwriter and former lead singer of the 70”s southern rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival got sued by his former band mates for (get this) plagiarizing himself. The plaintiffs, who now billed themselves as “Creedence Clearwater Revisited” with a brand new (yet similarly sounding) lead singer, said Fogerty plagiarized the riff from “Run Through the Jungle” for his song “The Old Man Down the Road”. The plaintiffs, who legally owned the rights to the song “Run Through the Jungle”, a song written and song by Fogerty when he was still with “CCR”, wanted to make sure that Fogerty was not making money off “their song”. The case was eventually dropped and the song “The Old Man Down the Road” was allowed to remain on Fogerty’s 1985 album “Centerfield”.

Another interesting case that was brought up in another interview about “intellectual property” is the infamous Bing-Ding-Ding-Ding-Dada-Ding-Ding incident, and by this I am referring to white rapper Vanilla Ice’s claim that he did not plagiarize a riff from a song written by David Bowie and Queen. Vanilla Ice claimed that the riff in his rap song “Ice, Ice, Baby” was ever so slightly different from the base line in “Under Pressure” written by Queen and David Bowie’s a decade before. Ice ended up looking like a fool trying to claim that he “created” the sample, the courts did not see the difference and awarded the case to Queen and David Bowie. In the end, Ice ended up paying a lot of money to Queen and David Bowie and lost exclusive publishing credits for his “new” song as well as a lot of fan support.

After reviewing numerous websites and looking over lawful court cases and opinionated blogs it would seem that I am not the only one who finds “intellectual property” hard to pin down and even more difficult to understand completley. The two examples documented above are both so notorious that they ended up being listed on VH1’s list of the Top Ten Most Shocking Moments in Rock & Roll. Although the two exmaples I documented above are both about music and its unique reaction to “intellectual property”, that is not to say that music is the only thing that copyrights spawn odd situations in. While researching on-line I also came across pornograph blogs in which the topic was discussed in some of or another. In one such blog I even found out that when it comes to objects such as sex toys that copyrights often do not apply, which is odd because you can copyright pretty much anything else including ideas. Apparently the patent office is about as mature as a 14 year old boy when it comes to the topic of pornography.