Lionsgate Missed A Defendant

Earlier in the week, Lionsgate Films filed a lawsuit against several companies for selling merchandise with the slogan, "Nobody puts Baby in the corner." That line, of course, is from Dirty Dancing, a film to which Lionsgate owns the rights. They allege that their copyright on the film covers its dialogue as well, and, therefore, anyone using the phrase without a licensing agreement is violating Lionsgate's copyright.

Not that I'm a Johnny Do-Gooder or anything, but I'd just like to point out to Lionsgate that they may have missed a defendant in their case. On the Fall Out Boy album From Under the Cork Tree, there is a song named "Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner," which sounds like copyright infringement to me.

Not that this is the first time they've done this. The titles for their songs "Tell Mick That He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today," "Of All the Gin Joints in All the World," "Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying," "Champagne for My Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends" are all quotations from movies that I believe are still coyprighted material. Even the line "He tastes like you, only sweeter" from their smash hit "Thnks fr th Mmrs" is a direct quote from the movie Closer.

Hopefully, the assorted copyright holders of these movie quotes will come forward and sue Fall Out Boy, forcing them to change their songs names to something equally pop-cultural, like "You Brought On the Heartbreak (But All I Got Was a Stomachache)" or "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued."

Oh wait, they already do have a song called that. I guess lightning can strike twice in the same place.

And on the flip-side of this argument, I think there might be a pretty good case against Bayer for co-opting the name of their new birth control/depression medication from the band of the same name.