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As you may know we sponsored Basingstoke Live last week (a local music festival) and ran our own ‘branded’ campaign of “supporting creative talent” across the event.

Part of the campaign involved taking some famous song lyrics and having them on banners around the various stages… “we bet that you look good on the dancefloor”, “it’s only rock ‘n’ roll but we like it”, etc. to add a bit of fun to our message.

One of my fellow Escapees showed me a forum post on the Basingstoke Live website with someone mocking it:

the Escape……supporting creative talent….nicking peoples lyrics for slogans. Discuss.

I guess you can’t please all of the people eh? Or, is it justified cynicism? I sometimes forget that the perception of some is that business is the bad guy. And, I guess that’s why if you have a point to prove, and we do, these comments drive us on… (so thank you Pog Treefrog - I am guessing that’s not their real name).

It highlights two thoughts for me personally:

1. The campaign got attention - it even got critics.
2. A good song lyric or film quote adds extra emphasis to any campaign.

Good lines in songs and films usually become clichés and it’s probably why advertisers use pop songs and film rip-offs all the time on TV advertising. If they are repeatable, they have value.

Who owns the words though?

Copyright is important and yes, lyrics, songs, films, etc. are all rightfully owned by someone - not always the person who created them though. As a design agency, we spend a lot of money buying rights to images and content each year.

That said, creative usage of lyrics and sampling has diluted many a great tune and film story lines seem all too familiar. I watched Bridget Jones the other day, which is a very similar story (if I am not mistaken) to Pride and Prejudice.

Then, think of all the bands that actually name themselves from characters or lines from books and films. Is that copyright infringement? I mean, think how much the Harry Potter brand must be worth now (£575m in 2005 according to Forbes).

The same is happening online - repetitive content from bloggers, the copy and paste generation, it’s all too easy. Need a photo? Just do a Google image search. Yes, but who owns it?

And, what about the individual words themselves? Think of EasyGroup and their insistence and resolution to own the right to any business that starts “easy” (example case). Seth Godin highlights the same mistake Apple could be making with the letter “i”. It’s all very confusing.

Conclusions

Sorry, I don’t know the answers and I guess it will only get messier moving forward. Context is also a very important factor when and where elements of other people’s content is used.

One other angle is the increasing number of people giving away content on the web to gain brand awareness. ie. Feel free to use this on your website as long as you reference me (also good for a bit of link love).

Anyway, I bet you did look good on the dancefloor, which reminds me how much I like the Arctic Monkeys. Think I’ll download their latest album. Third party reference points - can’t beat ‘em.