After 50 years: Dispute over Pippi Longstocking

In 1969 Rosy Teen & Orchestra Eric Frantzen singing "Hey, Pippi Langstrumpf" covered the Swedish title song for a TV series, "Här kommer Pippi Långstrump" by Inger Nilsson. The song was composed by Jan Johansson, the Swedish lyrics are written by Astrid Lindgren and the German lyrics by Wolfgang Franke.

The two lyricists have long since passed away. As SPIEGEL ONLINE has now made known, the heirs of Astrid Lindgren have been taking action since 2017 against the music publisher which holds the rights to the German version of the Pippi Longstocking song. Now the case is pending at Hamburg District Court because Lindgren's heirs believe that the German lyrics lack the necessary permission. It is not a simple translation, but a modification requiring approval.

For example, the Swedish original literally says: "That's not bad, I have a monkey, a horse and a villa, and it's also good to have a suitcase full of money", but the German text formulates: "I have a house, a colorful house, a little monkey and a horse, they look out the window from there".

/TWA

An expensive cover version

Metallica played the carnival hit "Viva Colonia" by De Höhner at their concert in Cologne (Germany) on June 13th. But that will become expensive now.

As Bild reported, the German collecting society GEMA collects a fee of 7,000 EUR for it. These would be calculated from the income from the Metallica concert. It can be assumed that 50,000 tickets were sold for an average price of 100 EUR.

German band De Höhner is proud according to the Bild report that such a well-known US-American band is singing their song and now wants to make a Cologne version of "Nothing Else Matters": "Alles andere zählt nit".

/TWA

Contact forms in test mode

In the old coverinfo.de there were forms with which you could send us corrections and new songs. In the new COVER.INFO we now also test such forms. Initially, you will only find forms for correcting existing entries and for adding initial or follow-up songs to existing entries. You can find the forms on the Song Page under the link "Report error / contribute".

But with the new database, the whole thing is not as trivial as it used to be. The dabatase has become much more complicated with many more data fields. The balancing act is to offer you an understandable form that you can fill out without having to go through a training course for COVER.INFO editors, but at the same time to retrieve the data in a way that allows us to internally work with it as efficiently as possible.

We will now gain experience with this first version of the forms and optimize them over time. You are welcome to write in the comments below if you have difficulties with the forms.

/TWA