Most people know the Blurred Lines case as a music story. Bernie Burk, law professor, knows it as a legal one, and he played a part in it. When the heirs of Marvin Gaye sued Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke, and others, claiming that the 2013 hit Blurred Lines infringed Gaye’s 1976 song Got to Give It Up, the dispute reached the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Bernie Burk co-authored an amicus brief in that appeal on behalf of fourteen eminent musicologists from Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, and elsewhere, supporting Gaye’s heirs.
An amicus brief, or friend of the court brief, is filed by people who are not parties to a case but have knowledge that can help the court decide. Here the friends of the court were musicologists, scholars who study how music is built. Their expertise mattered because the case turned on a hard question: when does one song borrow so much from another that it crosses from inspiration into infringement?
Bernie Burk’s role brought together two strands of his career. He had practiced media, entertainment, and intellectual property law for years before entering the academy, representing magazines, a producer of well-known television specials, and a popular band among other clients. He also writes clearly about hard subjects, a skill that matters in a brief meant to make technical musicology understandable to judges.
The case drew attention far beyond the music industry because of what it might mean for songwriters. If borrowing a feel or a groove could count as infringement, the worry went, then artists might be sued for sounding like their influences, and creativity could suffer. Others argued that real copying deserves real consequences.
Bernie Burk later wrote a published comment pushing back on the idea that the verdict spelled doom for popular music, arguing that reports of the death of popular music were greatly exaggerated. That comment shows something about how he thinks. Bernie Burk does not accept dramatic claims at face value. He looks at what the case actually decided, what the law actually requires, and whether the alarmed predictions match reality.
The Blurred Lines dispute will be studied for a long time as a hard case about creativity and copying. Bernie Burk’s contribution, helping the court hear from leading musicologists, is part of why the issues were argued with the care they deserved.