by Andy Wilson, editor
[email protected]
Everyone loves a good popular tune, especially ones written by Australians or Brits. Unfortunately, one such tune by the popular Australian recording group Men at Work has recently come under close scrutiny by the American judicial system. Entitled “Down Under,” this little ditty forged its way to the top of the popular recording charts in 1983 with such inspired lyrics as “Buying bread from a man in Brussels/He was six foot four and full of muscles/I said, ‘Do you speak-a my language?’/He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich.”
Apparently, the folks at Larrikin Music noticed a similarity between the flute riff of this popular classic and a children’s song written in 1932 by Marion Sinclair, an Australian music teacher. Her song, entitled “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,” has since become a popular favorite among schoolchildren down under. Unlike the inspired lyrics written by Colin Hay and Ron Strykert of Men at Work, however, Sinclair’s lyrics are rather more simplistic. “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree/Merry merry king of the bush is he/Laugh, Kookaburra, laugh, Kookaburra/Gay your life must be!”
After studying Larrikin Music’s request for 60% of the royalties from “Down Under,” Federal Court Justice Peter Jacobson said he considered it excessive, overreaching, and unrealistic, judging that the band would only have to pay 5% of money earned from the song since 2002 and future royalties. Even so, this judgment is still expected to net Larrikin Music a six-figure sum.
A better riff
Those in the machine-vision and image-processing industries might predict where my tale is headed. Indeed, I have previously expounded on intellectual property, patent infringements, the lawsuits that surround them, not to mention the amount of wasted time and energy that occurs when such lawsuits are filed. Nowhere is this litigation more apparent than in the software industry, where every year it seems one company sues another for patent infringement.
However, it seems to me that those involved in attempting to stifle the innovation of others by using these techniques have missed the big picture. Today, many software manufacturers offer sophisticated machine-vision and image-processing packages that can be used to perform a number of different functions. In purchasing and deploying these software packages, a system integrator may use very few of the function calls or graphical libraries to perform a specific task.
Despite this, the system developer must still purchase a fully featured machine-vision or image-processing package. Rather than offering multiple functions within these packages, software vendors could develop more modular software packages, allowing system developers—and possibly even rival software vendors—to choose which functions they wish to perform and incorporate these functions into their own software packages. In this way the system integrator would be offered a lower-cost solution.
When systems were then sold to the end user, the system developer would pay a less expensive up-front fee to the software vendors and a percentage of royalties, based on the amount of software code used and the number of systems sold.
This concept is well known in the music industry where many composers in the music industry now “sample” other artists’ music in their “original” works. Just as the borrowed flute riff in “Down Under” will possibly net Larrikin Music a six-figure sum, code sampling could increase the sales of software, while hopefully reducing the amount of litigation that now occurs in the machine-vision and image-processing industry.
