Attributing Mondegreens
I just realized that in the previous post I mis-attributed my misheard Flip, Flop, Fly to the songwriters of the original. Obviously they didn’t actually write what I thought I heard, but does that mean my mondegreen ought to be attributed to me? In terms of copyright it’s a derivative work, so I couldn’t actually claim sole ownership of the rights to the “new” version, though it’s not clear to me off the top of my head whether the current owners of the copyright to the song would be able to claim ownership either. The legal situation is made more complicated by the system of compulsory licensing that’s in place for songs: in the US you cannot legally prevent someone from performing a cover version of your song as long as they pay you royalties (except that you do have the “right of first recording”) and do not “substantially alter” your song. What happens if someone did substantially alter the song? I don’t know. What, you expect me to do some real research? I suspect that the compulsory license provisions wouldn’t apply, and you might have to do some genuine negotiation if you could track down the copyright owners; not necessarily an easy task, particularly when the original creator(s) are dead. Oh, and then there’s parody and the First Amendment.
Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be IP lawyers…
update: Ok, just for you I did a little research, at least to the extent of googling up this.