In 2004, Boston musician Bart Steele wrote a song about the Red Sox called "Man I Really Love This Team", and sent it to the club and to Major League Baseball. In 2007, the Bon Jovi song "I Love This Town" became part of a major MLB advertising campaign.
Believing "I Love This Town" was an unauthorised derivative work of "Man I Really Love This Team", Steele subsequently took legal action against several parties including MLB, Turner Broadcasting System, and songwriters Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Billy Falcon, reportedly seeking a $400 billion payout. The Massachusetts District Court dismissed his claim in August 2009, but in November, Steele filed an appeal.
Steele's claim revolves around his belief that "Man I Really Love This Team" was used as a temp track for the MLB advertisement.
What is a Temp Track?
"Advertising firms, in order to make a commercial, edit visual images to follow the music, particularly when incorporating an existing music work," Steele explained in an interview with Suite101.
"Unscrupulous advertisers use pre-existing music – without licensing the music, acknowledging its use, or paying the artist – as a starting point or template for the inspiration, creation, and editing of the visual images for a commercial. The advertisers then hire other musicians to create music to accompany the visual images in the spot.
"The widespread advertising industry practice of illegally borrowing music without the artist's permission to create visual images is called temporary tracking, or temp tracking. The purpose of temp tracking is to give the paid musician (brought in to add music to the visual images) a theme, cohesive time line, structure, and beat (through video editing cues) to work with. All of these elements are, of course, derived from the temp track: the work of the unacknowledged and unpaid musician."
How Do Advertising Companies Get Away With Temp Tracking?
Steele said advertisers went to great lengths to disguise their copyright infringement.
"In an effort to pass off the commercial’s music as an original work by the big name performer, the advertiser may hire a musicologist, who gives detailed advice about how to alter just enough elements of the pre-existing music to survive a musical copyright infringement claim – that is, a claim based solely on a music-to-music comparison," he said.
"Interestingly, if an infringement claim is brought, defendants will often hire the exact same musicologist who 'cleared' the music to testify at trial as an 'objective' expert, even though that same musicologist was actually on the advertiser's payroll during the creation of the advertisement.
"In some instances, to further advance the appearance of originality, the advertising company allows the record label to release the big name performer's music as a single or part of an album before the commercial."
Steele believes this is what happened when a longer version of "I Love This Town" was released on Bon Jovi's 2007 album Lost Highway. On the other hand, Jon Bon Jovi has said the song was written about Nashville, where Lost Highway was recorded.
"No doubt the big name performer also has no desire for their fans to discover that they actually recorded the music specifically for a commercial spot," Steele said.
"There would be even more outrage if people discovered this commercial was commissioned by a giant corporate media conglomerate utilising an illegal temp track."
Steele also spoke with Suite101 about his $400 billion claim and denied suing Bon Jovi for publicity, before reflecting on how the case had affected him.
Lee-Ann Khoh - Lee-Ann Khoh has been writing since she could read and hold a pen, and exploring the World Wide Web for more than a decade. These two ...
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