Court Decides on MEN AT WORK "Down Under" Plagiarism Case

MUSIC NEWS- Australian rockers Men At Work won’t have to pay out as much money as they thought for plagiarising an Aussie folk song for their classic rock tune, Down Under.  A Sydney court ordered them to hand over 5% of the royalties to the publisher of the children’s song Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree , a sum which could top $100,000.

Earlier in the year, an Australian court ruled that the band’s songwriters, Colin Hay and Ron Strykert, had broken copywrite laws by taking parts of a flute riff when they recorded Down Under.  Larrikin Music Publishing (Kookaburra… publisher) asked the court for nearly 60% of the song’s royalties, but a Federal Court judge said he considered “the figures put forward by Larrikin to be excessive, overreaching and unrealistic”.

Colin Hay had stated to the court that the group did not get copyright clearance for the flute riff because it was an “unconscious” reference to the children’s song which has the flute riff in just five bars of a 92-bar song.  The children’s song was originally written by schoolteacher Marion Sinclair in 1934 for the Girl Guides. Copyright to the song was bought by Larrikin back in 1990 for $6,100 (£3,520).