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Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
“There’s an Iowa kind, a special chip on the shoulder attitude we’ve never been without that we recall"
If you know that line and can sing it somewhat in tune you are a true Iowan. I chuckled this week reading the news that Meredith Wilson’s widow is holding firm to the fact that she still owns the copyright to his music much to the chagrin of the Iowa Lottery and the University of Iowa (known by us Cyclone faithful as Eastern Iowa U).
The spat started when the University gave permission to the lottery folks to use the Iowa Fight song for an advertising piece promoting the Lotteries give away of a horribly vandalized car. But low and behold, after listening to a very pour parody of Wilson’s famous song, along comes Wilsons’ estate to the rescue. After some carefully worded legal bantering the Lottery has pulled the adds, and the University is sticking with the CYOB line of “We felt we were within our rights to give permission to use the song and we’re checking into it."
Good job out of you in Iowa City! Let’s go ahead and besmirch the only decent composer to come out of this state in the last 150 years. Outstanding! A couple of thoughts come to mind. It is a fact although most fans don’t know that the song, first played at Iowa in 1951, is actually a parody within itself taking its melody from another famous song; perhaps you are familiar with it? Hum along if you’d like….”It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas"
So in a way Mrs. Wilson, your husband’s parody of an old Christmas classic actually started this whole mess in the first place. But before I get all warm and fuzzy with the U of I let me say that it’s about time someone steps to the plate and slaps the legal teams at these Universities square in the mouth.
Just because you are a University and you have vast amounts of knowledge and obviously more than enough free time to worry about things like this does not mean that you have a monopoly on things. Lest we need to remind ISU that the more people who put a little CY mascot on their website the more fans you get, or the more you allow high schools to use a logo similar to yours the more students from that school that might just want to enroll in your fine institution and save on sweatshirts. Or even as the case of that group of knuckle draggers in Madison who feel they have the right to the letter W, perhaps you need to go back to kindergarten and learn the letter people again! It’s time to use some sense here and put things in perspective, but man it sure is fun to watch them scramble.
See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.