Did Google rip off the Last Week Tonight theme for a new commercial?

Hill says he’s consulted several music publishing friends, all of whom not only say it’s unquestionably his riff, but that it’s common practice for a company like Google to tell a composer that they want a jingle to sound like a song—”Go,” for example—but that they don’t want to pay for the original song’s rights. Thus, the company will essentially ask said composer to just rip it off by changing a few notes or the key of the song. Hill says one of his music publishing friends told him, “for what these things pay, they could have just hired you.” Though, as he put it, “[Google] could have done anything else and it would have been just as effective for their pathetic usage. They could have strummed a G-chord for a minute and it would have been just as interesting.”

It’s worth noting that Hill recognizes that “there’s a lot of thievery and borrowing in music,” and that his “Go” riff isn’t entirely original—he’s previously been told that it features pretty prominently in a song by the Cure, though he says he “wasn’t inspired” by that song “at all.” That being said, Hill says what Google did is especially despicable because it’s “the exact same rhythm and the exact same notes at the exact same time,” noting that the internet company “basically just cut [his] song in half and looped it.” In Scharpling’s case, Hill says, Google straight up “stole his song. They changed two words to this thing he came up with,” noting that he played it on his radio show last night and that, when crossfaded, the songs “just go right into each other.”

Though Hill says he’s consulted his music publisher, he’s skeptical that Google will ever bow to his complaints. He told The A.V. Club, “One of the music publishing guys I talked to said they probably changed it enough that it’s a pain in the ass to pursue,” though “a more litigious entity would scare them.” Hill also noted that he’s “a big fan of thuggery” saying that “Google is not far from my house. I’m not opposed to just throwing a rock through their window or something, or going in and stealing some laptops or something. It’s just scumbag behavior, and they know what they’re doing. He concluded, “It’s just lame behavior, really. It’s not even about the money. It’s just the fact that this massive company is just saying, ’We could do this the right way, but instead we’ll just fuck you guys,’ which seems to be their business model.”

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