>you can copyright arrangements - at least they did in the big band era

This is absolutely true and still true today. I was best friends in college with a son of one of the original Weavers, so I got to learn about how much of the 1950s and 1960s folk music revival was based on people who made money copyrighting "arrangements" of public domain songs. Randy Sparks, the guy behind the New Christy Minstrels, would keep a calendar that marked off the exact date when various Stephen Foster songs would go into public domain and then he'd file copyrights on new arrangements of the Stephen Foster song. If somebody else recorded a Stephen Foster song that sounded a little too close to your "arrangement," then you could demand royalties.

The Blurred Lines verdict is nothing compared to the NWA ruling (known as Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films) that basically turned "sample trolling" into a legitimate and very lucrative business. Unlike the audible similarity between Blurred Lines and Got To Give It Up, NWA got sued for using three notes from a Funkadelic song that was all but unrecognizable by the time it was recontextualized as a sample in an NWA song. George Clinton himself disputes Bridgeport Music's claim to Funkadelic's music publishing rights as based on fraud, but that doesn't stop Bridgeport Music from being a very lucrative rent-seeking business. Basically, the entire business model of Bridgeport Music is to listen for Funkadelic samples and sue as many rappers as possible, even though George Clinton doesn't get a dime from the music and is generally very favorable to sampling of his work by rappers. Sample trolls are parasitic scum-sucking bottom dwellers on the music industry, akin to the role that patent trolls play in the IT industry.

yea i think it's a dangerous precedent, even though there have been other cases (My Sweet Lord/He's So Fine)

i think their (Pharrell/Thicke) behavior didn't help their case one bit, it seemed in various interviews they acknowledged, then denied it...seemed like their story was ever changing

i also learned today that arrangements can be copyrighted, which also seems pretty ridiculous

i also learned today that arrangements can be copyrighted, which also seems pretty ridiculous

Led Zeppelin should be fucked.

I'm guessing that, in their time, they were ... often ... basically at will.

I have no remorse about Anus and Andy getting it stuffed up their giggy - other than the overly-dramatic daugther I heard blubbering today (I think) on the WGN news ... brother Marvin didn't deserve a pistol to the face, but there'd have to be at least a hearing to determine if she doesn't.

Marvin was "looking down on them!"

He was sittin on The Dock of the Bay!