This week, Maroon 5's Adam Levine called for a 'little more compassion and understanding' in the situation. Sam Smith did something similar when similarities were noted between their song Stay With Me and Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down.

In addition to the track with Swift and Antonoff, last week Paramore's Hayley Williams and Joshua Farro were added as co-writers on Good 4 You, meaning they will now receive a cut of the royalties that track earns. Outside of blatant cases - for example, Clive Palmer's use of Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It - the more common way to deal with an allegation that a song has been copied is to quietly add someone to the songwriting credits retroactively, as Rodrigo has now done. The mood does seem to have shifted in recent years, so we might not see pop music's newest teenage superstar face much legal grief (also because Taylor Swift loves her).

'But it doesn't make sense to restrain the kinds copying that we saw in Blurred Lines, and that we are seeing in all these other cases, where it is not a straight-up copying of the entire work, it's taking elements of that work to create something new.' So, is somebody going to sue Olivia Rodrigo?Īnything's possible! But there have been no threats yet.

'It makes sense to restrain people from coming along and copying the song exactly as it is, and sticking it up for people to download for free or whatever. It made barely anyone but a small coterie of entertainment lawyers happy.Īs Dr Kylie Pappalardo, a senior lecturer in intellectual property at QUT, told in the ABC in 2018: 'Blurred Lines' became shorthand for a fiercely litigious era of the music business that saw Radiohead sue Lana Del Rey and a Christian rapper sue Katy Perry.

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