Message-Id: <01BDF1EB.72023DC0.lnktheriot@csi.com>
From: Ken Theriot <lnktheriot@csi.com>
To: "'minstrel@pbm.com'" <minstrel@pbm.com>
Subject: minstrel: filk and stuff
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 12:10:15 -0400
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Sender: owner-minstrel@rt.com
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Fionna, Adelaide here.

	I was afraid that would be confusing.  The notes I gave you are the actual 
melody line, not chords.  The chords would be:

C                             G          C
Fighting soldiers from the sky
C                G                            C
Fearless men who jump and die
C                 F                              C
Men who mean just  what they say
C                        G                        C
The brave men of the Green Berets.

About your filk query, I see Greg has already responded, but I wanted to 
add my own view from the soapbox.  Filk is period.  Filk is fine. 
 Plagiarism is not.  Much SCA and Sci-Fi filk uses not only available 
melodies, but major concepts and lyrical threads, including your hamster 
example.  I would have known even if you hadn't told me what the filk was 
done to because I know the real song; as you can see by the real lyrics, 
even the first line of your filk piece gives away the origin.  Not only is 
the concept the same, the story of a group of fighters, discussing their 
background and motivation, but whole phrases have been lifted from Barry 
Sadler's page.  This is "borrowing" more than the tune, and is a practice I 
feel should be discouraged.  The parody loophole only gets you so far - it 
does not allow you to PUBLISH THE TUNE (saying, "sung to the tune of" is 
okay, which is how MAD magazine has done it all these years), and there 
must be substantive lyrical changes (MAD is again a great example-there 
lyrics normally bear no relationship to the actual song except the title, 
and titles are not copyrightable in the same way lyrics are).  You may also 
NOT PERFORM IN PUBLIC unless you (the site, actually) pays performance 
royalties on the MELODY.  Your living room is cool, major sites, especially 
where commercial ventures such as merchanting are going on is not. 
 Performed parody usually changes the melody as well-Sesame Street does 
this all the time.  The title of the piece is evocative, and the melody is 
evocative, but there are major changes made ("Can Read" is based heavily on 
"Can Do" from "Guys and Dolls", and it is staged identically, but the 
lyrics of course have nothing to do with horse racing, and the melody goes 
up where the original goes down and vice versa, setting it well outside 
copyright violation).

Quite beyond mundane considerations of copyright, even plagiarizing-filking 
songs in the public domain shows a lack of original thought.  If you are 
going to filk a Christmas Carol because everyone knows the tune and you 
want them to sing along, great!  This is what was done in period.  If you 
are using whole pieces of the song to make a joke, maybe you'd better think 
about how clever that really makes you.

There is good filk.  A guy from Ansteorra once played me a song he had 
filked to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" about the armies of Faerie 
riding to war, and not one word (okay, "the", you know what I mean) in 
common with the original lyric.  This was excellent for several reasons 1) 
I am one of the few people I know who actually KNOW all the words to the 
"Wreck", and the audience was listening to HIS lyrics, and not to Gordon 
Lightfoot's, in their head; 2) the rolling beat of the music was just as 
effective to give the feel of horses' hooves pounding as the ocean swells; 
3) as the line is fairly unvarying and he was doing a radically different 
chordal arrangement, it was possible for many people (as long as they 
weren't Lightfoot fans) not to realize what it was ("Gosh, that melody 
sounds familiar....").

Filk should be used as a resource for people who cannot or don't want to 
come up with their own tunes, or to involve a group in a piece of general 
interest.  It should not be an excuse to make a joke at the expense of 
someone else's creativity.  There was a terrible filk going around Caid for 
awhile which was "Let There Be Wars on Earth", "filked" to (can you guess?) 
"Let There Be Peace on Earth".  They changed TWELVE WORDS from the 
original.  This is not a joke; this is theft.

Then there is the courtesy issue... I wouldn't use your chair without 
asking your leave, let alone the product of your creative juices.  Old 
songs for which no one is collecting royalties are one thing, but to take 
something from someone who may depend on it for their living (MOST 
musicians do not get rich) is rude if nothing else.  I have had to gently 
explain to someone who thought a piece of mine "wasn't done" and offered to 
write "a few more verses" that yes, it WAS done, and if she had another 
story to tell she could write her own.

Everything has degrees.

TTFN				Adelaide


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