Maiden settles the Hallowed Be Thy Name claim in full

Ramon Unzaga of Chile invented and was the first known futballler to perform the bycicle kick. Others use the kick. Kareem Abdul Jabbar perfected his (un)patented "skyhook shot" in basketball. I see hook shots in every other game now. Van Damm and Schwartzenegger and Stallone socked people in movies, gotta owe something to Bruce lee and John Wayne?
They get paid, but don't pay those who used these facets of the respective genres prior. Bits and snippets. Copied? Reused? Modified, tweaked? The examples and arenas can go on forever. Similar. Very close to the same? Yes. Court case? Not.
 
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Given the "musically incenstuous " and highly derivative nature of rock music, from the Beatles onward, I think claims of plagiarism are mostly ridiculous. This is complicated by the fact that there are only 12 notes in Western music, and of those notes, only so many combinations are pleasing to the ear.

With lyrics, so many tropes have been rehashed throughout the years...in the spectrum of plagiarism complaints, grabbing and only slightly modifying 2 lines from elsewhere in a song with over 20 seems like a trivial infraction when other bands are unapologetically co-opting imagery, song structures, arrangements, lyrical concepts, stage presence et-al from their influences.
 
Guys, listen to Life's Shadow and The Nomad. We're not talking about a similar riff here or adapted lyrics or something just randomly so happens to sound alike. It's a note-by-note copy of an extensive and relatively complex instrumental section, it's clearly plagiarism.
 
soundwave said:
Given the "musically incenstuous " and highly derivative nature of rock music, from the Beatles onward, I think claims of plagiarism are mostly ridiculous. *rambles on while utterly denying artistic integrity*.
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I think claims such as these are ridiculous. The downplaying some people do out here.
 
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Have listened, repeatedly. And It is definitely the same. No argument there. Just offering up examples of entertainment and artistry , 'reused' as PART of an intirely different, whole entity in the future. Of which none required litigation.
It is bothersome, and I believe unnessesserry for Maiden to have done this. It sucks actually. But again as stated, they have been copied mimicked, used as an obvious influence by many. And those artists have gained fame, financial gain as a result. Just another side of the coin.
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My honest opinion about all of this: Maiden really fucked-up big time here. Plagiarism is a horrid thing and while I love the band, I'm glad they got hit with this to keep them in check. Stealing from the same band twice? And from the same song? With a span of nearly twenty years between? That's just sad.

Hallowed and The Nomad, while both are good songs, have never been my all-time favorites. In fact, this only cements my feelings on them. Steve has written some amazing songs over the years, far too many to mention, and far too many to get overlooked by a song which - holy shit! - he barely wrote lyrics to. I still love Hallowed, but my opinion on it is the same: great song, but there are better Maiden tracks.

So in short, I'm rather glad that we can know that our heroes aren't perfect and have moments of weakness, and it's also good to know that even the giants can be fought against in cases where they err. I'm looking forward to the band moving past this and simply being Maiden again, hopefully a little wiser and better off for it.
 
Diesel 11 said:
he barely wrote lyrics to.
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I agree with most of your comment, Diesel, but I have to refute this one bit. What Steve "adapted" from "Life's Shadow" equals to not even 30% of the entire lyrics, which means he wrote a whole other 70-something% of it. He was wrong in using the lyrics without permission, and yes, it's plagiarism, but that's not to say he "barely wrote" the lyrics. He definitely wrote most of it.
 
I'm not going to dispute that Maiden/Steve/Rod have messed up here somewhere along the line but has everyone missed that the reason they fought this case in the first place appears to be that they genuinely believed Quinn's claim to be fraudulent, and Barton's genuine? I have no idea what the reason for this might be but as they were prepared to fight a court case on the strength of it they must have thought it was a pretty good one.

When Barton went to them in 2012 they settled with him straight away, and as far as we know without argument. Why nothing was done before this, who knows? But the point is that when it was brought to their attention they were quite prepared to put the matter right.

The 2012 settlement with Barton was a satisfactory conclusion to the story originally told to us by @fisherenterprises in 2010. The lawsuit with Quinn belongs to a different story.
 
Black Abyss Babe said:
I'm not going to dispute that Maiden/Steve/Rod have messed up here somewhere along the line but has everyone missed that the reason they fought this case in the first place appears to be that they genuinely believed Quinn's claim to be fraudulent, and Barton's genuine? I have no idea what the reason for this might be but as they were prepared to fight a court case on the strength of it they must have thought it was a pretty good one.

When Barton went to them in 2012 they settled with him straight away, and as far as we know without argument. Why nothing was done before this, who knows? But the point is that when it was brought to their attention they were quite prepared to put the matter right.

The 2012 settlement with Barton was a satisfactory conclusion to the story originally told to us by @fisherenterprises in 2010. The lawsuit with Quinn belongs to a different story.
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And Fisher seems to dance around this in some of his measured responses about the same doesn’t he?

I mean the Hallowed thing wasn’t exactly sneaky. They covered a Beckett song. Steve talked about his love for the band.
The “theft” was right there for anyone to see. Strikes me as more of an unsophisticated mistake in a less sophisticated time compounded by poor decisions once it started to became clear that the way it was handled was wrong.

Steve definitely is in the wrong, but I suspect it was done with less malice and calculation than any of you downloading a pirated movie or watching a football game over an illegal stream.
 
I am more curious about how The Nomad came about. I can't imagine them consciously saying "lets 'borrow' an obscure Beckett track for our middle section," but it's so identical to the original that I can't imagine them not being fully aware of what they were doing.
 
The instrumental section towards the end of Nomad is the same but I’m sure it was done in tribute rather than a complete rip. Like when they copied the Perfect Strangers riff. That said I’m disappointed that the boys claimed to write it.

With HBTN you would think Steve could have switched the lyrics around just slightly. As we know most of his songs are borowed from film titles or other sources, so there is scope for more potential litigation.

That said they are hardly Led Zeppelin as far as ripping off actual songs.
 
I think Davey included the bit in The Nomad as a tribute and...well, I hate to say this, but I suspect two things happened - one, Davey didn't understand that what he was doing was plagiarism; two, everyone who heard the track before it was released didn't realize what was happening. Rod, Caveman, the rest of the band. The only person who I find that odd from in the end is Steve, who is a huge Beckett fan as well.
 
Yea. Your theory seems plausible LC but I suspect it was Steve, not Dave.
 
I rather suspect that they thought Beckett had long since vanished into nothingness, since nothing had ever come of the Hallowed lyrics, so considered it okay to reboot that instrumental into the Nomad instrumental. Surely Dave or any other member of Maiden would understand it was technically plagiarism, having been in the music business so long, but assumed it was past history and permissable. I realise Hallowed is the bigger hit and worth more in royalties, but had I written that really lovely piece of music reused in the Nomad, that's the thing I'd feel far prouder of and want credit for.

I'm still not comfortable with the suggestion that McKay's involvement is altruistic. He sounds very fired up for someone who wasn't personally involved in the matter originally. If he's a one-man crusade against plagiarism, how come he's focusing mainly on Maiden/their management? I'll be interested to see if the other legal actions he's promised are other members of Beckett v Maiden, other musicians v Maiden, or include other musicians v other big names in the music industry.
 
Mosh said:
I am more curious about how The Nomad came about. I can't imagine them consciously saying "lets 'borrow' an obscure Beckett track for our middle section," but it's so identical to the original that I can't imagine them not being fully aware of what they were doing.
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It's not identical, the framework is the same but there's a lot more detail filled in in the Maiden version. Also a lot of time had passed - best part of 20 years since Hallowed - and although Steve may have been a fan of Beckett in the late 70's it doesn't follow that he spent the subsequent two decades listening to that album so it may be a case of genuinely unconscious recycling - as (possibly) with Adrian and 2MTM, "just maybe it was buried in his subconscious somewhere". You may consider this suggestion strains your credulity to its limits but it is possible.
Brigantium said:
I'm still not comfortable with the suggestion that McKay's involvement is altruistic. He sounds very fired up for someone who wasn't personally involved in the matter originally. If he's a one-man crusade against plagiarism, how come he's focusing mainly on Maiden/their management? I'll be interested to see if the other legal actions he's promised are other members of Beckett v Maiden, other musicians v Maiden, or include other musicians v other big names in the music industry.
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There are a few things about McKay that bother me. Even if his cause happens to be just, I still do not like his manner of dealing. He's been as deliberately inflamatory and provocative as he could manage right from the start - very much not appreciated. And Maiden's statement afterwards that he described as "sour grapes" actually spoke volumes about how his case was conducted (and frankly the word "cynical" springs to mind). He may win his client's cases but I don't think he wins them any friends.
 
Forostar said:
I do not suspect Dave for inserting that section. The other songwriter has a hand in using other music.
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I agree. The feeling I get when listening to the song is that Dave wrote the riffs and guitar melodies during the verses and the chorus, but that the rest of the song was Steve.

Speculation: Steve inserted the instrumental section when reworking the song in 1999 (remember that it was a leftover from Virtual XI).
 
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