Copycat Fight

Earlier this week The Los Angeles Times reported about the anxieties of influence faced by singer Avril Lavigne in "Is 'Girlfriend' really 'Boyfriend'?" The copyright battle itself is relatively standard fare for the industry, although the role of dualing musicologists as expert witnesses points out the rising importance of what was once considered a relatively obscure discipline in academia that had become more obscure after the abuses of the Nazi era in which scholars testified about the relative "Jewish" pedigrees of insufficiently Aryan music. What caught my attention about the LA Times reporting was the rhetorical importance of the singer's MySpace page as a site where she defends herself against both the accusation of infringement and answers another allegation that she doesn't write her own material. Critics of the singer have used YouTube to offer side-by-side comparisons of the content of "Girlfriend" and the Rubinoos' "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend." This evidentiary video -- "AVRIL LAVIGNE GETS SUED! SONG COMPARISON!" has been pulled because of "a copyright claim by the Recording Industry Association of America," but this more subtle video that makes the case is still online.