I think, and I'm by no means a lawyer, the difference is who's watching. When the Snes  was still on the big console to have, it was viewed as a childrens toy. No body probably cared enough back then to try to argue in court over a childs plaything. Now multimedia game consoles are in everyone s house. In fact it turns out close to 65% of the US plays video games.

I think it's probably Nintendo being scared of their own Shadow.  If the music is the case then why haven’t games like Act Raiser, Sonic, and Crono Trigger had their music changed?  I mean other than sonic the first two were on the SNES and ported over to other consoles fairly recently. So if it was a case of “back then the SNES was for kids” Then why have these games been aloud to be re-released. As for Sonic, well, other than being on the genesis, it’s still in the same boat as the others. So why are they able to release it so many times without changing the music? No. I think, if anything, it’s because Nintendo thinks that the people who own the rights to the songs they were inspired from are going to go super duper sue happy and basically try to shut them down. I doubt that will happen though.

there really isn't a good reason whjy nintento would not want this game out in america.

I am curious, has there ever been a case where a record label sued for video game music being a little too close to that of a pop song?  I could look this up myself, but I thought I'd ask you guys first in case I'm missing something obvious.

Does this count?

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3170842

How about this:

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/06/24/nintendo-sued-over-use-music-1993-film

Those refer to straight up samples, not soundalikes.

My bet on the EA case is that someone at EA either:

A.  Assumed it was part of the liscensing agreement with UNLV.

or

B.  Assumed it was public domain.

Either way, song probably isn't worth 150K per occurance.

Well, the first one certainly would.  The second one not so much, since it's not the implementation of pop music in a video game.

Though I do find it interesting that the first article is of someone suing EA over a school fight song, and not a monolithic record label suing over a pop song.  Especially since I'm pretty sure EA would have gotten permission to use the song from UNLV, who you'd think would own the rights.  Apparently it's only a limited license.  I can't find any info on what happened with the lawsuit though.

I think that a lot of the similarities could arise from composers being on a tight deadline and just creating an appropriate tune from what comes to them. Often what I find to be the issue is that your brain is patterning the music you create on a whim based on what you've been hearing.

A sort of Charles Bonnet for the ears, when starving for a tune you hear something you already know, at times unwittingly.

 First of all, in most of the cases these songs are not similar enough to get sued for. There are laws that says how much of a song that is allowed to be borrowed (like 4 bars or something, and that the melodie has to be almost spot on identicle), and I think the melodies here are not similar enough in most cases. I also belive that the composers are not aware of some of the similarities when they write their music. They are just choosing a fitting genre and therefor they remind of other songs in the same genere, and sometimes they are also obvious tributes. I think people are to hard on the composers, it is more or less impossible to be original these days.

I really like your shows Roo, and find us very similar in taste of games and humour,  and although i don't agree with everything in this episode I  still enjoyed it very much. Thanks for your awesome work!!

wait, we just got Robo rolled again?

DAMMIT!

Braid! Widely praised for its soundtrack, the music to level 1-1 is a shameless ripoff. So much so that this one Youtube video even misidentifies it as the original song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3WKz7jXHgQ

I mean, check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIBA__XaUwE&feature=related

But it's not! Braid uses some sort of creative commons-like licensing deal for music, and Luar na Lubre is a Spanish folk group that has been publishing commercially for decades. It's not a folk song in the popular domain, either, they composed it in the eighties. I checked the listing, and Braid's is a track by this cellist Shira Kammen, and it's called "Downstream". Okay, so it doesn't anger me that much, Luar na Lubre are much, much bigger than the ripoff lady, and I'm pretty sure they've received enough royalties for the original track to buy them Celtic themed brand new supercars every year, but credit where it's due, right?

This is a little piece I noticed at the gym a while back. It was so obvious that I literally ran back to the locker room in time to write down some of the lines from the song so I could look it up later to expose the injustice. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc-aJNCzwbM

Now....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cSTqvihLyg

If you need further proof from the same composer, listen to the first few seconds of this as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ine3_jdQIIs

About half of these I can definitely see (mainly the first half), but the second half (including the last example) was at worst "inspired by" your examples.

Funny I have heard Waltzing Matilda before, in my History of Australia/New Zealand course I took in college. Professor even played and sang the song himself.

Did you know that there was a large portion of Australian citizens who wanted Waltzing Matilda to be their national anthem? But in the end, Great Britain picked "Advance, Australia Fair" for them.

My favorite music stolen by Nintendo was TMNT for NES ripping off Iron Maiden Number of the Beast for the main theme song