Elton John's 1985 hit "Nikita" didn't infringe another songwriter's copyright for a ballad about an "impossible romance between 'a Western man and a Communist woman' separated by the Cold War." The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit said so in affirming a lower court's rejection of Guy Hobbs' 2012 case. Hobbs' tune "Natasha" is about "an actual, though brief, romantic encounter" between the ill-fated lovers. In "Nikita," a man pines for a woman confined by "guns and gates." The songs simply tell different stories, Judge Daniel Manion wrote, and "what matters is that the particular ways that each song expresses these concepts are dissimilar." — Sheri Qualters
Classic
