&gt; <i>John Fogerty wasn&#x27;t sued for sounding like himself, he was sued for plagiarizing a song he didn&#x27;t own.</i><p>Hmm. Seems to me like &quot;sued for sounding like himself&quot; is less misleading than &quot;sued for plagiarizing a song he didn&#x27;t own&quot;. The latter statement appears to imply that he stole someone else&#x27;s work and then unduly passed it off as his own. The idea that someone might take credit for another&#x27;s hard work is usually the source of any disgust directed towards acts of plagiarism. On the other hand &quot;sued for sounding like himself&quot; more accurately captures the nuance of this situation where the artist actually authored the original material but is then accused of writing a song that sounds similar to the original even though he doesn&#x27;t legally own the rights to the original.<p>&gt; <i>And now we&#x27;ve got some dumb new falsehood floating around whenever people talk about record companies and music publishing. &quot;You can literally be sued for sounding like yourself!</i><p>Well, I don&#x27;t feel like that is a dumb falsehood or an unfair characterization, he was quite literally sued for writing a song that sounds similar to a different song that he also wrote; no, he didn&#x27;t legally own the song, but in the context of criticism against the record industry, having a record label come after you because they think your new work sounds too similar to your old work that you sold off sounds like a quintessential example of why artists and their fans resent big labels.