Shakespeare - interesting link, thank you. It got a bit heavy to read everything there, but I didn't see anything to suggest that Colin Hay or Greg Ham had deliberately lifted the phrase from "kookaburra".

Tangledwood, apparently it was an Australian TV game show in 2007 that got Larrikin's attention.

Yes, I watched that show when it first went to air. That was the first time that I thought about any connection between the songs. I still question why it took so many years for anybody at Larrikan to make the connection.

Given that a piece of music is restricted by key to a certain selection of notes, and by rhythm to to certain phrasing, isn't it mathmatically inevitable that a riff in one piece will someday show up elsewhere? We can never play the sequence dee dee dee dah because it came from Beethoven's Fifth? How many bars have to be duplicated before it becomes plagarism?

If the law looks for precedences from previous cases wouldn't this ruling also apply to writing? Common phrases such as "once upon a time" or "It was a dark and stormy night" could never be used again.

Les, that's a gloomy prospect isn't it? Unfortunately SNACs split up a couple of years ago so I guess they'll never be put in that situation.