Karen Lee: Welcome to Intellectual Property Matters. In this WIPO podcast, we explore the fascinating world of creativity, innovation and intellectual property. Let's listen, learn, and get inspired.
Ben Rylan: Hello, I’m Ben Rylan. Welcome to the first episode of Eye on Copyright Enforcement, a mini-series of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s latest podcast, Intellectual Property Matters. You might be wondering, why copyright enforcement? Every day, we enjoy movies, music, books, videogames and countless apps on our phones – all thanks to the work of artists and creators from around the world.
While copyright automatically protects the works of creators, fighting copycats is still a major challenge. When do we infringe copyright? What do creators and users of content need to know about respecting copyright, offline and online? And what can some landmark copyright infringement cases teach us? In conversations with artists, lawyers and creative industry experts, we’ll explore the importance of respecting copyright. Today, Todd Pipes, member of the 90s rock band Beep Blue Something, shares what he wishes he’d known about copyright when he was just starting out.
Many years ago, around 2005, I think- I was driving through rural Australia in the state of Victoria. Now, this was before the time of Spotify playlists. So the only music I could listen to in my car was whatever the local radio station happened to be playing. The music in country Victoria tends to be rather “pub rock” inspired. Think ACDC, Midnight Oil, or perhaps quintessentially Cold Chisel. Then, to my surprise, a song started playing but I'd completely forgotten about.
“You’ll say that we've got nothing in common
No common ground to start from
And we're falling apart”
It was called Breakfast at Tiffany's. And it was first released in 1995. When I was just ten years old. I'd grown up loving old Hollywood films, so anything that celebrated a classic movie was going to get my attention. The music video featured the band sitting down to a rather improbable Champagne breakfast at a large oak dining table, on the street outside the same Tiffany’s store that Audrey Hepburn was standing in front of, when she took that famous bite of a pastry. Aside from the lyrics in the song, a few glimpses of the shopfront are the only nods we get to the classic film. And yet, the hit song still punched the bad into a little bit of hot water; but not because of its association to old Hollywood cinema, however. Todd Pipes is the lead singer of the band Deep Blue Something. Todd, welcome to the show. And thank you for joining us. First, tell us how did your hit track of Breakfast at Tiffany's first come about?
Todd Pipes: It was a combination of things. One: I had had the phrase Breakfast at Tiffany's in my head for a long time, like a year. I knew that if I could work that into a song…there's something about the way that phrase sounds, whether you've read the book or seen the movie or anything, something about that sounds good, interesting, right? But it's not easy to work into a song. You know, there's a lot of syllables. So I had that in my head for a long time. And then on the other side of things, I was in graduate school at the time, studying writing and you know, we reading a lot of prose poetry at that time, or at least that semester, both Leia and Rambo and those guys and so I was thinking at the same time, would it be possible to write a popular song that didn't rhyme? So I had those two different ideas. I wish I hadn't considered putting them together. It's just these two ideas.
So one day I worked at the university library, and I had 15 minutes or so before I had to go to work. I sat down on the couch, and Roman Holiday was on. Okay, different Audrey Hepburn movie and I thought, I just need to try to work on this song. So, you could walk around with it in your head forever.
At some point you got to sit down on the guitar and start working on, so I just started. I sat down and started playing this D thing - you know, this progression in D and then I just started going... Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I was like, oh, that fits! If I go from D to the kind of a B and then this A to G thing, I can get Breakfast at Tiffany’s in there. So what needs to come first then? And that's what made me think of “and I said, what about Breakfast at Tiffany's”? That was like, that's it! So I wrote the whole song around that, those two lines, because that got the phrase into the song. “She said, ‘I think I remember that film’”. Okay, that's very easy.
So now I've got this other character: there's a boy and a girl. This is going to be a breakup song. And then it all kind of hit me. These two people are breaking up. Their relationship was so worthless, that the only thing they got out of it was that they kind of liked the same movie. They didn't like it a lot. They just kind of liked it, if they remember right. And that's it. That's the whole… and I was like, okay, cool. So I had the chorus, I had kind of the rough progression. And I walked to the library to work, and that's when I started kind of going over the lyrics. And I started just writing down the ideas about this back and forth, right? “You say we got nothing in common”. And that's when it hit me. Maybe this is the song. I can hide the lack of rhyme idea, the prose idea into it, because the chorus will carry the song and people won’t notice that that none of it rhymes.
And so I wrote it. I finished the lyrics at the library, took it to rehearsal right after that, and so we played it. And I could tell that first time that that that connected with people. But the funny thing is, no one noticed ever, that it didn't rhyme. My bandmates didn't mention it. No one noticed. And I was going. “Well, I guess that's a good thing that no one’s noticed.” But I was trying to do something what I thought was impressive. And no one's noticed, like, for years and years, but there you go.
Ben Rylan: So Todd, given the song references popular culture, were you ever at least a little bit concerned about any copyright issues?
Todd Pipes:
I thought about that, but I knew from a little bit from the writing standpoint, that you can reference another work. And this is two characters in this poem, if you will, referencing something else. I wasn't too stressed about that. I was just reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot the other day, and he has a long introduction that’s taken straight from Dante’s Inferno, like he quotes it, and again, he's making reference, he’s citing the reference. He’s not trying to act like it's his own, but it's there you know, and that's done a lot in literature.
Ben Rylan: You will obviously quite a bit younger back then, just starting out in many ways. Was copyright ever on your mind in those days?
Todd Pipes: Yes, because of sampling. And it was so relatively new, because what a lot of people don't know is that Toby and I had come out of an electronic background, that we had only picked up guitars, as a matter of convenience. Because setting up synths and samplers and drum machines and playing a live show, it's a pain. Whereas where we had gone to school, there were tons of bands and it was just grab your guitar, you grab your amp, you throw your stuff on stage and you start playing.
So all that to say, we had been around kind of the early parts of using samples in songs. And we knew at the time when it first started, you could have four seconds of a song and use it in your own, which was crazy because you can base an entire song around four seconds. Four seconds is a long time. Now, this was changed, but originally you take a song like Kiss Them for Me by Siouxsie and the Banshees or Pearl by Chapterhouse and they both use a sample of a rap song. It's the basis of the rhythm of both of those songs. The songs are written around that. But that came under that four seconds loophole at the time.
So we are very aware of that type of thing, because that's the copyright of the recording, the copyright of the song. Things get a little bit more vague because there's 100 songs that have a one, three, five chord progression. It's when the chord progression becomes more complex, that you can point at it and say that one was mine. Like when Radiohead had Creep, everybody was like, oh my god, they stole that whole, entire song. They stole that song! That was pretty obvious to people. So we were aware of it on a sampling end, and didn't really care too much about on the song writing end. I felt like we were fairly safe with our chord progressions and stuff.
Ben Rylan: I've heard that there are many artists who are actually terrified of accidentally infringing on copyright. Do you think it's easy to do that?
Todd Pipes: Now, for sure. And in fact, that's part of my problem with modern music. Some of it is very intentional. Some of it you can tell they sat down and said let's write this song, and they steal the entire thing. And if it's successful, whether they just give away some of their publishing to the writer, then no one cares, but it's outright stealing. But the problem is, even if you don't do it intentionally, within the format of rock and roll or pop music, there’s only so many pleasing chord progressions, like the Don't Stop Believin’ chord progression. That's literally… there's 100 songs.
As time moves forward, it’s going to become more and more difficult to have a song that's truly unique. Because we are in the convence, because if you start to change your chord progression too much, well, then it becomes very, like progressive music or classical. So we're kind of stuck here. It's happened to me before too. You know, you sit down and you write something and you very quickly realize oh, my gosh, I just wrote such and such. But then there have been other times where I thought, well, I'm stealing that. And I'm just I'll see if anybody says, you know, like it's a small part. And then you get worried Oh, my gosh, it is too much like it and then I'll go back and listen to the original. And I won't have realized that I strayed so far from it. And it's not anywhere near.
Ben Rylan: And you had a bit of a brush with copyright ownership law early in your career, when someone claimed ownership of some of your early work. What happened?
Todd Pipes: We had made a record for this independent company, a small indie label. And it had a version of Breakfast at Tiffany's on it, we had recorded it. Well, there's two different types of copyright. There's a copyright of the writing of the song and then there's copyright of the recording. We didn't think that that was that great of a version so when we made the home album, we re-recorded Breakfast at Tiffany's and did a much better version.
Well, the problem was, or the lawsuit stems that is that the person on the opposite end was somewhat ignorant about the two types of copyright. Like, yes, that recording that was on your label. Well, we're not using that recording. And you don't have anything in the contract that says that we can't re-record it. So, we have re-recorded it. A lot of that whole lawsuit, the problem was the parties on different sides, simply not understanding what they were going after, because at one point they were going after Interscope and Interscope was going this, what you're asking, it doesn't even make sense.
So if this lawsuit had been brought up, say in LA, it would have been dismissed instantaneously, because the people out there were more familiar with it. The lawsuit was filed in Denton, Texas, where the lawyers were not involved in the music business, the judge, anybody involved was like, well, I guess we got to see what happens to your because it seems like they've done it. No, it's two different copyrights. And that eventually got settled, very much like many lawsuits and the lawyers made the most money, whatever.
So what I've also faced a couple of times, are people randomly that have claimed that they co-wrote the song, like, oh, yeah, I knew Todd. I used to hang out with them all the time. I wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And somebody eventually would come to me and go, “Hey man, have you ever heard of this person?” “No, I don't know.” “Well, he's claiming this”.
There's this one guy in Dallas, who had claimed this and he was using it to get gigs: to get producing gigs to get, you know, gigs and bands and stuff, claiming that we are I wrote that, but I just hadn't heard of him. The craziest one was I got an email from the bass player of the Spin Doctors. He was out in LA. He was a part of this kind of fun cover band side project thing that had different people from different bands and they were doing this thing.
One of the guys in his band, the way he got in the band is because he claimed to have written Breakfast at Tiffany's for us, and he was doing some fairly suspicious things and so the guy just on a on a hunch, contacts me said, “Hey, I’m the bass player from Spin Doctors. Here's my situation. Do you know this person?” And I said, “No, what are you talking about?” He explained that this guy had gotten this gig and many others out in LA, just claiming out of hand to have written Breakfast at Tiffany's, and just no one had checked him on it. And so I contacted him and said, I know what you're doing, and I hope you've got some deep pockets because you're gonna pay for this. And I got this long letter saying “I'm sorry. Yes, I absolutely did it. I used it to get gigs and it worked. So I'm not even going to try to claim that I didn't, but I don't have any money and suing the really won't do any good, but I won't do it again.” Yeah, even with the Internet, people just believe stuff.
Ben Rylan: Still to come, we'll hear from Todd on what he wishes he'd known when he was just starting out. Stay tuned.
Todd, do you remember how difficult it was to find a song that you liked before Spotify came along?
Todd Pipes: Yeah, and YouTube, too. I think YouTube is even better. And in now it's just it's the greatest thing. I spend so much time going down wormholes on YouTube. It’s fantastic. Everything is out there. And now, like we have because of Spotify and Tidal and all those digital services, almost every record that has ever been made is right there. If you can think of it, it's somewhere there.
Ben Rylan: This is actually a true story. I actually remember watching the music video for Breakfast at Tiffany's on Saturday mornings when I was a kid, and I did buy the single but, you know, I kind of lost track of my music collections. But then one day years later, I think it must have been around 2010, I was walking through a shopping mall in the outskirts of Melbourne, when I just happened to glance at the single section of a CD shop. Now for those born post 2000, CDs singles, were like CDs that contained maybe one or two tracks and Todd, there you were: at least 10 years after the release of the single, somehow your CD was being sold at this shop alongside whatever the top tracks of the day were, Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park, I suppose. So there you go. I actually bought your CD single twice.
Todd Pipes: Awesome! I appreciate that. Okay, so that's on the consumer end. You go to a shop and it’s not there. Imagine though being in a band and being on tour to promote your record and you stop by the record store and they don’t have it. The frustration of distribution is unbelievable.
These great bands who had made a great record, but the distribution side of their record company was bad. You know, Big Star is one that I always think of. They're unbelievable, incredibly influential. The people who bought Big Star records immediately went out and started bands on their own. But the problem was they were signed to a label that was primarily rhythm and blues based, and had no connection with rock record stores. So no one bought their records because they couldn't, whereas now no matter how obscure even if I'm not a label, if I'm just a guy and I know how to make one thing on my computer, just a drumbeat that goes for five minutes, I can I can record it today and it can be available worldwide on Tuesday.
Ben Rylan: Now obviously artists today are working in a completely different world with the Internet. Do you think young artists are getting more savvy to digital rights protection?
Todd Pipes: I think sadly, and maybe now more than ever, artists are not savvy to anything. I know they're very concerned if they're getting some upfront money so that they can kind of perpetrate a lifestyle, but they don't realize. They may have given you some upfront money and that's fun because you know, you're you know, 19 years old and you just made a rap record or something. Well to you $25,000 is an insane amount of money. Look at all the money I've got. But what you haven't paid attention to is that you just signed a deal where you're getting two per cent and I tried to explain this to people, like hip hop and Christian music, I think are the most nefarious. The Christian end I think, is actually really funny. You will sign a record deal not with a record company, but with a producer; and the producer has signed a deal with the record company.
So the artists thinks, oh, I got I got a 15% deal, or I got a 20% deal. But yeah, you got a 20% deal of a 15% deal. Also your deal is for sales royalties, not for publishing because the guy who made the beat, you don't know this, but that production guys signed something that says that guy owns the song or at least 50% of it because he made the beat that you're rapping over, because hip hop more than anything else. You are here and gone. It’s all instantaneous.
So, somebody who's mega right now, six months is nothing and they've got nothing to show for it. They're just sitting there going what happened? The Christian end of things is very, very similar. You write a song as a Christian songwriter: it will usually get absorbed into a conglomerate that has signed a different publishing deal and it's the same kind of thing. And what you don't realize is you don't own any of the song: you'd signed the whole thing over to somebody else. What you used to not be able to legally do, but you can now. So, people are not aware or they think they're aware, but there's 10 billion loopholes. And now the danger is you don’t have the physical paper trail to follow in an audit.
Ben Rylan: With a track as successful as yours, I suppose you must go online and see it popping up in all sorts of strange marketplaces that you’ve got no idea about. How do you feel about unauthorized versions of your music online?
Todd Pipes: I've noticed this, that there in for a little while. It would it would pop up like someone doing a cover version. And they get you know, they have like 500,000 hits on their YouTube channel. The publishers usually paying attention to that kind of things.
I noticed that in the last couple of years, Universal has really cracked down on those types of things. We did have something in our contract, which I asked for, and I cannot imagine why I thought to ask for it. But I had in our original Interscope contract had said you cannot put this on a compilation without our permission because I had read somewhere that that's how they'll get you. They'll sell, you know, half a million copies of a compilation and then you don't get anything because it's promotional material. So we've been protected in some ways about that kind of thing, because we have a strong publisher, Warner Chappell, and then we have a strong Universal Music on that end of things.
So, we don't see too much where it pops up and we're like, “What the heck is this about?” I have witnessed a few sound-alikes, like on the background of this one particular reality construction show: they kept playing the song over and over. That was Breakfast at Tiffany's. It was just plain as day. It had been re-recorded. It was slightly different. Through a mutual friend I had him contact him: “Hey man, if you want to use song just ask us. You know, we've got mutual friends just ask us. We will re-record it for you. But are you kidding? You use this little clip 15 times a show. It's so obvious that's what it is. You can at least pay us you're making millions. Is it not in your budget? You couldn't have just even asked?”
Ben Rylan: Do you have any advice that you would give to your younger self?
Todd Pipes: The thing that I was the most unaware and just like everyone else, was when that first wave of people copying and sending things on the Internet - we were a major victim in that. Breakfast at Tiffany's was set. I have to think that there were millions of dollars lost in that first file sharing thing on our end. I don't know what I would have done. What I could have said to myself to have paid attention to it. But that was the thing. The record companies were naive. We had no earthly idea about that. That was astounding to me. That changed everything.
Ben Rylan: We've been talking a lot about how online marketplaces affect rights protection for, especially for younger artists. I suppose it's fair to say that piracy has sort of gone down in many ways because of the ease of the streaming age. I mean, when you think about it, you pay a small fee to be a member of something like Spotify or whatever. And that means you have access to virtually everything. Piracy is kind of thrown in the too hard basket for a lot of people. Do you think that's become a good thing? I mean, Spotify has basically succeeded in making piracy just too difficult?
Todd Pipes: I do, 100%. And I think it encourages seeking out and finding new things. I use Tidal because the frequencies are broader. Because I do a lot of production and mastering still, so I want to hear the highest fidelity and title has higher fidelity than Spotify. I am seeking out so much more music because I don't have my wife over my shoulder going: “You bought 10 albums last month on iTunes? I just got the bill.” You know it really kind of pays off for me because I'm just consuming so much music and going down all these rabbit holes. I think it is positive. Yeah, you're right. Why would I bother trying to find somewhere to steal it for free when essentially once I paid my monthly thing and I've consumed five albums worth of material, well, then this is free, essentially. So, I think if they could just make a couple of tweaks to make it slightly more friendly for the artists, I think in the long run, it's going to be great.
Ben Rylan: Todd Pipes, thank you very much for joining us. And thank you for listening to “Eye on Copyright Enforcement”, a production of the World Intellectual Property Organization, brought to you with the support of the of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea. I’m Ben Rylan. I will be back next time with another conversation on copyright enforcement. I do hope you’ll join me. Until then, good bye.