If you have had a toddler in your house sometime over the past few years, you likely already know all about the "Baby Shark" song. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are among the luckiest people on the planet. Except now I'm going to embed the video below to ensure you are aware of it.
I'll give you a moment to shake off whatever ill feelings you have for me.
Now, the origins of the song are something of a minor mystery. We'll get more into that in a second. For now, you can note that Pinkfong's "Baby Shark" video was published on YouTube in 2016 and has millions of views. It was only this summer, however, that a musician named Johnny Only sued Pinkfong in South Korea for copyright infringement, claiming that the latter's music was a ripoff of his own "Baby Shark" song that he published on YouTube in 2011.
I already know what you're thinking: "But, Tim, those songs do sound very, very similar." And when I tell you that Only is claiming in his lawsuit that the songs are specifically similar in length, tempo, rhythm, and style, your first thought is probably to agree with Only entirely. But maybe your second thought would be, "Wait, why are those the only similarities he's claiming? Why not the lyrics, which are largely the same? Or the music entirely? Why is he so specific?"
The answer has to do with the mysterious origin of "Baby Shark."
Even Only admits that “Baby Shark” predates him, however. Although no one is quite certain of the song’s origin, it’s believed to have been a campfire chant developed at U.S. summer camps for kids sometime last century. The song may have emerged in conjunction with the success of the “Jaws” franchise — though that’s just another theory.
In other words, this is a song without a known author — which effectively make the original version a public domain work.
Yup, this is a song that is generally considered to be in the public domain. At the very least it's an "orphan work," in that there's no clear evidence of who the copyright holder is, and no one has stepped up to claim it in the past few years that's it's even charted. That means that, for Only's suit to be successful, he's going to have to demonstrate that the elements for which he's claiming similarity were not part of the original song, were created entirely by him, and that they are protectable given that most people consider the rest of the work to be in the public domain. That's not an impossible task, but it's a fairly high bar to clear.
SmartStudy, the company behind the Pinkfong brand, is already pointing to the public domain song as its inspiration.
While Only insists that he should receive credit for what has become a worldwide phenomenon, SmartStudy strongly disagrees. They insist that their version of “Baby Shark” was based not on Only’s, but on the public domain version that Only based his work upon.
Given that this is all happening in South Korea, it's difficult to predict exactly how the courts will decide on this. That said, this sure feels like two versions of a public domain work where the real reason for the lawsuit is that only one of them became massively popular.
