Late singer Marvin Gaye’s family is suing singer Robin Thicke, claiming that Thicke’s summer smash hit “Blurred Lines” blatantly copied Gaye’s No. 1 hit “Got To Give It Up.”
The Gaye family had already raised the issue earlier this year and now they are officially taking action after Thicke and producer Pharrell Williams took preemptive legal action to seek protection.
According to billboard.com:
“Marvin Gaye’s family is responding in a major way to Robin Thicke’s lawsuit claiming that ‘Blurred Lines’ wasn’t stolen from Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up.’ On Wednesday, the family went nuclear with counterclaims that allege that Thicke stole the summer mega-hit and also committed copyright infringement on Gaye’s ‘After the Dance’ to create his song, ‘Love After War.’
“What’s more, the new legal papers obtained by The Hollywood Reporter suggest that Thicke’s ‘Marvin Gaye fixation’ extends further to more songs in the Thicke repertoire.”
“This court battle was triggered in August when Thicke and his producers Pharrell Williams and Clifford Harris Jr. went to a California federal court with the aim of preemptively protecting ‘Blurred Lines’ from allegations that it was illegally derived from Gaye’s song as well as Funkadelic’s ‘Sexy Ways.’ Requesting declaratory relief, the plaintiffs stated that ‘being reminiscent of a “sound” is not copyright infringement.'”
What may be troublesome to Thicke is that before theses allegations, earlier this year, he was on record saying that he and Pharrell did look to Marvin Gaye as an inspiration for “Blurred Lines.” He said in interviews with GQ and Billboard:
“Pharrell and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give it Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.’ Then he started playing a little something and we literally wrote the song in about a half-hour and recorded it.”
Although Thicke’s interviews may give the Gaye family some support, it may not be enough to find him and everyone else involved guilty. Oftentimes in music people take inspirations from certain artists or time periods to evoke an emotion, without directly infringing upon a copyright. It’s been seen before with artists like Prince and Michael Jackson, and it may be hard to prove.
But the Gaye family is standing their ground and now it will up to the courts to decide if there was any infringement.
