ABSTRACT
The debate over music in advertising often revolves around who has permission to grant the use of a song in a commercial. This chapter considers the role of authorship in music licensing through an examination of the 1987 watershed event that saw the Beatles’ “Revolution” licensed to Nike by Michael Jackson, owner of the publishing rights to the group’s song catalog. The system of music copyright complicates the assumed link between authorship and ownership such that the songwriter does not necessarily own or control the licensing rights. The use of “Revolution” by Nike is a tale of old notions of authorship struggling to survive under a modern system of copyright, and, as the earliest prominent case of music licensing in a commercial, it is an apt starting point for the analysis of this practice and the larger issues invoked by interactions between popular music and advertising. This case and others like it suggest that popular music does not receive the same type of moral consideration as the fine arts, where the creator is legally protected from uses of the work that may threaten his or her reputation, even after the work has been sold. In the absence of a legally-backed system of authorship ethics, the entry of unguarded commercial interest into the realm of culture is facilitated.
