I forgot to paste the letter in the additional info spot:
Dear Mr. Walsh:
We represent Joe Walsh -- not you, but the musician who plays guitar with the Eagles. Joe wrote a song called "Walk Away." A lot of people know this song. That's why when they heard your campaign song, "Lead The Way," they noticed it was the same song as "Walk Away," but with peculiar lyrics.
As a candidate for Congress, you probably have a passing familiarity with many of the laws of this great country of ours. It's possible, though, that laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on. We're writing because we think laws are important, and it might be beneficial to your potential future career as a congressman if you were more aware of them.
First, there's the United States Copyright Act. It says a lot of things, but one of the things it says is that you can't use someone else's song for your political campaign promotions unless you get permission from the owner of the copyright in the song. As far as we can tell, you didn't do that. Maybe you got so busy with the campaign that you just forgot. But that's no OK.
Second, under that same United State Copyright Act, you're not allowed to take someone's song and change the lyrics. This is not to say you're not allowed to write silly lyrics, you just have to write them to your own music. Now, I know why you used Joe's music -- it's undoubtedly because it's a lot better than any music you or your staff could have written. But that's the point. Since Joe writes better songs than you do, the Copyright Act rewards him by letting him decide who gets to use the songs he writes.
You might also want to check out the trademark laws. They're there to protect the public from being confused as to the source of goods or services or as to whether someone endorses particular goods or services. Given that your name is Joe Walsh, I'd think you'd want to be extra careful about using Joe's music in case the public might think that Joe is endorsing your campaign or, God forbid, is you. Or maybe you intended that. But you shouldn't have.
