What is "Original"? What is "Homage"? What is "Theft?"

[LimpingFish]

I recently wrote a piece of music that I thought was pretty original, but it turned out to bear a clear resemblance to an already existing piece. While it wasn't exactly the same, and I hadn't heard the existing piece in a long, long while, I was still disappointed in my brain for letting it slip through, and not realizing sooner, especially as it's the kind of thing I regularly notice with other artists.

Take these two pieces, for example...

[from about 0:50 onwards...]

[from the start...

Goblin have heard the Alan Parson's track and incorporated it almost wholesale into their own work, consciously or otherwise. Parson's album came out around the time Goblin were re-scoring the Australian horror picture Patrick for the Italian market, and obviously they liked what they heard.

Conversely...

Here, while not a direct copy, Goblin's music from the 1982 Dario Argento film Tenebre, a track entitled (ahem) "Lesbo", may be an influence on John Carpenter's theme to his 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness.

It features similar pacing and key changes (though Carpenter takes longer to get to the initial drum lead in), and while, as I said, not identical (Carpenter apparently wanted it to feel like, of all things, a Metallica track...), Carpenter's admiration for Goblin is well noted (his Halloween theme is often compared to Goblin's theme for the 1975 Argento film Deep Red).

But then, the Patrick track isn't identical to the Alan Parson's track, just very, very similar. It's clearly a stronger case for plagiarism, should it be argued.

What is my point? Just that it's funny sometimes how the mind works in regard to memory, inspiration, creativity, I suppose. Also, I guess, how far do you have to go to pass "homage" and enter "theft"?

Other examples, either "plagarism" or "homage", should anyone know of any, would be appreciated.

[TheFrighter]

In this cases there are people that knows each other (Alan Parson + Claudio Simonetti + John Carpenter) so I suppose was a friendly inspiration.

Ennio Morricone said that nobody can claim originality in modern music, because there are centuries of music works before.

_

[KyriakosCH]

Eh, that Lesbo ost is a bit too derivative (Don't fear the reaper)

I think this is pretty common in (modern) music, and at times is by chance (when the chord progression is simply ubiquitous), at other times by forgetting you had heard that before, and at other times it is just shameless theft (eg the Offspring's intro to Self-Esteem is just picked up from Smells Like Teen Spirit)   

[Retro Wolf]

The difference between homage and theft is whether the reviewer enjoyed the project or not! 

[Cassiebsg]

Homage you give credit to the inspiration. Thef you claim it as yours, period. 

[Danvzare]

Original is when you steal from so many different sources, that it's impossible to identify a single one. The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, are all brilliant examples of this (especially since they're practically all the same story).

Homage is when you heavily reference something, even copy it to a point. But where it's clearly not only it's own thing, but is also clearly doing it out of a love of the thing that it's paying homage to rather than simply because it's popular. Good examples are most modern Slasher movies, everything High-Fantasy made after The Lord of the Rings, and anything Sci-Fi made after Star Wars and Star Trek.

Theft is when you take something and claim it as your own, making no notable changes. A good example in my opinion are all of those "Movie" movies that came out in the early 2000s, such as Epic Movie and Disaster Movie. (They got away with it because it came under parody, which is one of the few exceptions the law makes for theft. So it wasn't actually theft, and those were in fact terrible examples.)



Of course this explanation leaves lots of things unanswered. Such as taking inspiration from something, being a spiritual successor, how similar can you make something to something else, what do you have to change for it to not be classified as theft, among many other things.

I'm not lawyer, but I know a lot when it comes down to copyright law. So I can actually answer those questions to some extent if you wanted me to.

But rather than answer them, I think it's easier to show you two examples, and let you figure out why one was perfectly fine while the other was not:
Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times for the Nintendo DS
and
Motor Rock for PC

[eri0o]

Spoiler

Harvest Moon meets Dragon Quest vs Rock'nRoll Racing?

[close]

[LimpingFish]

...(eg the Offspring's intro to Self-Esteem is just picked up from Smells Like Teen Spirit)   

Funnily enough, isn't the riff from Smells Like Teen Spirit widely regarded as basically being the chorus from More Than A Feeling by Boston?

...I think it's easier to show you two examples, and let you figure out why one was perfectly fine while the other was not:
Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times for the Nintendo DS
and
Motor Rock for PC

Indeed. Whereas one is a clone (which, in games, is something that happens all the time, really), the other takes actual elements from an existing game (the audio, the logo, etc.). In fact, I might go so far as to say, if they hadn't included those elements (or, for that matter, blatantly said they were remaking Rock N' Roll Racing), they might have been free to release their game. To elaborate, the levels, vehicle designs, and redrawn character portraits (if they didn't include actual Blizzard resources) are less egregious, in my opinion, and closer to what is known in comic-book circles as "swipes". Yes, it's frowned upon, but it's not exactly illegal, just artistically bankrupt.

Returning to music, the difference between stealing and being inspired by is a somewhat murkier, and, with the advent of "sampling", harder to define. Bittersweet Symphony, by The Verve, and Sam Smith's Stay With Me, resulted in songwriting credits, and royalty rights, being retroactively added for the original artists of the songs that "inspired" both tracks, namely Mick Jagger and Keith Richards by way of the Andrew Oldham Orchestra for The Last Time, and Tom Petty for I Won't Back Down. Ironically, the Rolling Stones original version of The Last Time, takes (noted) influence from an old gospel song.

Of course, wherever my stance on sampling and it's use in certain tracks ultimately is, I'm inclined to lean towards the negative the more prominently it occurs in a song.

For instance, the Amen Break is a widely used and recognizable drum sample that's been in use so long that it's now become the musical equivalent of the Wilhelm scream. It's popped up in so many songs, that it seems redundant to criticize it. Vanilla Ice's appropriation of Queen's Under Pressure , with Ice Ice Baby, is a little more egregious, in my view, as is M.C Hammer's U Can't Touch This, in relation to Rick James' Super Freak, and criticism of both occurred at the time.

But, as I said earlier, if cloning video games (or movies, for that matter) is more or less accepted part of the video game industry, can you clone a song? Is Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters not just a clone of Huey Lewis and the News' I Want A New Drug?! /s

[Snarky]

But, as I said earlier, if cloning video games (or movies, for that matter) is more or less accepted part of the video game industry, can you clone a song? Is Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghostbusters not just a clone of Huey Lewis and the News' I Want A New Drug?! /s

I know a court thought so, but I've always found that a bit ludicrous. They're both ripping off Bar-Kays' Soul Finger, which to my ears Ray Parker Jr.'s track resembles more than it does Huey Lewis's.