The music publisher who owns iconic Australian folk tune Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has hit back at Men at Work’s Colin Hay for declaring “opportunistic greed” as the only winner from yesterday’s Down Under court ruling.
The Federal Court ruled that flute riffs in the 1979 and 1981 recordings of the iconic song reproduced a substantial part of Kookaburra, infringing its copyright.
In a statement released late last night, Hay – who wrote Down Under with Ron Strykert – hit out at Larrikin Music Publishing, which now owns the rights to Kookaburra. The song was written in 1934 by Toorak school teacher Marion Sinclair as part of a Girl Guides competition, but the copyright not registered until 1975.
“I believe what has won today is opportunistic greed, and what has suffered is creative musical endeavour,” Hay said.
He attacked the motives of Larrikin Music Publishing, which launched the court action after similarities between the two songs were highlighted on ABC quiz show Spicks and Specks in 2007.
“It’s all about money, make no mistake,” Hay said.
But Norm Lurie, the managing director of Music Sales Australia, Larrikin’s parent company, defended the court action.
“Of course it would be disengenuous for me to say that there wasn’t a financial aspect involved, (but) you could just as easily say what has won out today is the importance of checking before using other people’s copyrights,’’ he said.
“In the same way, I’d hope that Colin and the other writers of Men At Work don’t have a problem with people using some of their material for financial gain.’’
The company has hit the jackpot since buying the rights to Kookaburra in 1990 for just $6100. Mr Lurie estimates Larrikin has netted “hundreds of thousands’’ of dollars from licensing agreements with publishers and authors around the world, who had always considered it to be in the public domain
“It’s earnt a hell of a lot of money for us since we’ve bought it,’’ Mr Lurie said.