In music, there’s a difference between plaigiarism and quoting. You can’t, obviously, reference your sources in a three minute song. Generally, it’s not considered a problem unless it’s the entire song (see the Ghostbusters vs. I Want a New Drug lawsuit from the 80s between Ray Parker Jr. and Huey Lewis).
You can, however, quote a part of another song. Musicians do it all the time. It’s commonly accepted practice. That’s clearly what happened here. There’s no question he’s quoting the Kookaburra song (he’s sitting in a gum tree in the original video, for pete’s sake), but the real question is whether or not it matters.
I’d say no... along with damn near every pop musician of the last 60 years.
Answer songs (someone’s sequel to someone else’s song) used to be common in the 1950s and 1960s. Some resulted in lawsuits but others did not.
Then the was the tactic of adding No.2 to a title (I’ve seen it with country songs from the 1960s, some parodies but others were answer songs).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answer_song
You summed it up nicely. I am very pro-copyright, and I’d hate for any of my published works to get ripped off.
But this is a quotation of a fragment of melody that has come to be recognized as quintessentially Australian—it’s not a ripoff of a whole song or the melodic/harmonic structure thereof. Heck, Mozart was doing it back in the day.
I hope the “damages” are light. I really think this is a stretch of a lawsuit.
But isn’t that was Vanilla Ice was sued for by Foreigner, or whoever it was?
“Sampling” - as it’s called now - is not new. Heck, the national anthem for the USA was just a beer-drinking bar song from the UK with original words to it.
But while quoting a song is often a common practice, it has been established that you cannot sing 90% of Howlin Wolf's “Killing Floor Blues”, throw in a Robert Johnson line about “squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg”; and then call it “the Lemon Song” (Led Zeppelin)and not pay Howlin Wolf his money.
But the riff on squeezing lemons was obviously not “plagiarizing” Robert Johnson.