When the death of Rolf Harris was announced, I ran through some of his music in my mind and then discovered his War Canoe was later partially plagiarised by Adam Ant’s Prince charming …what do you think about these two 
I wouldn’t say it’s plagiarism more like “inspired by”. With a limited number of chords and notes its impossible to sound completely different to every other song in the world.
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Yes, part of the Prince Charming tune and metre sound similar to the War Canoe song - but they sound very different overall and I wouldn’t have linked them together without listening to them one after the the other to compare them.
Where is the line between inspiration and plagiarism?
I read somewhere that when Rolf Harris had contacted Adam to complain about it, Adam had responded
“Well, mate, fair enough about Prince Charming sounding like War Canoe, but let’s have a little look at where you got that from.”
Apparently, both tracks have musical similarities to an old Māori song - according to the song’s producer, Chris Hughes, when Adam spoke to Harris on the phone and pointed out that both tracks had borrowed heavily from an old recording of an old Māori canoe-type song, Harris had acknowledged it with a bit of a giggle and that was the end of the matter.
Although Harris later claimed he received an out-of-court settlement and substantial royalties for the Prince Charming plagiarism, which is a bit of a cheek if he did copy it from an existing old song himself.
If that is true, I guess Harris may have been able to put up a convincing case that when he “borrowed” from the old recording, he had made changes to it and that the Prince Charming song had copied from his arrangement and not from the original old recording.
Who knows the truth? 
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