Social Mores At Work: Sigur Ros Calls Out Commercials With 'Similar' Music

from the homage,-fromage dept

We've been talking about how social mores can awful be a lot more effective in dealing with "unauthorized copying," rather than calling up the copyright lawyers. In discussing it, some people have wondered how those making copies get caught. Well, sometimes it just takes the person/band/company who had their stuff copied to call it out. Grillo points us to a news story about how the band Sigur Rós called out a bunch of advertisers for creating songs that are very, very, very similar to Sigur Rós tunes for commercials after being turned down by Sigur Rós. The band's blog post is (brilliantly) titled homage or fromage is done nicely. It's not mean, or threatening. It just points it out and includes YouTube embeds of many of the commercials in question:

we're not suggesting anyone's ripping anyone off here, or has purposely gone out to plagiarise sigur rós music, because that might get us sued (which would be ironic). and in any case, you can get all the musicologists' reports you like and all they will tell you is that the chord sequence is "commonly used" or the structure is a "style-a-like" and not a "pass off"rós. or - in this case - that despite the fact that the two pieces are "strongly similar in terms of general musical style, instrumentation and structure" and "created with a knowledge of and/or reference to the works of sigur rós in general and 'hoppipolla' in particular", there is "insufficient evidence in the music to support a claim for infringement of the copyright". in other words change a note here, swap things around a bit there and, hey presto, it's an original composition. inspiration moves in mysterious ways.

what we wanted to do here was post series of ads that have made us go 'hmmm' and let you decide who's zooming who? but quite often when you go back and look for them you find the ads in question have disappeared off the radar (come in coca cola mexico, new zealand lotto, telmex chile, etc). anyway, here's a few expensively produced, gorgeously executed examples of brands who you might feel are inserting a little too much fromage in their homage.

Always nice to see a band not go legal, but look for a more creative way to make their point.

Filed Under: copies, sigur ros, social mores