The Beatles Dealt With a Copyright Dispute Over ‘All You Need Is Love’

In 1967, The Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” on a live broadcast. The song was a swift success for the band and became an anthem for the summer of its release. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. The band ran into copyright issues following the discovery that producer George Martin included a song that was not in the public domain.

The Beatles ran into trouble over ‘All You Need Is Love’

“All You Need Is Love” includes elements from several songs, including “La Marseillaise” and the 1939 song “In the Mood.” The latter eventually became a problem for the band.

“In arranging it, we shoved ‘La Marseillaise’ on the front, and a whole string of stuff on the end,” Martin said in The Beatles Anthology. “I fell into deep water over that. I’m afraid that amongst all the little bits and pieces I used in the play-out (which the boys didn’t know about) was a bit of ‘In The Mood’. Everyone thought ‘In The Mood’ was in the public domain, and it is — but the introduction isn’t. The introduction is an arrangement, and it was the introduction I took. That was a published work.”

Consequently, they had to pay royalties to the publisher of “In the Mood.”

“EMI came to me and said: ‘You put this in the arrangement, so now you’ve got to indemnify us against any action that might be taken,’” Martin said. “I said, ‘You must be joking. I got fifteen pounds for doing that arrangement, that’s all.’ They saw the joke. I think they paid a fee to Keith Prowse, or whoever the publisher was, and I wrote the arrangements out.”

The Beatles performed ‘All You Need Is Love’ on a live broadcast

The copyright dispute did not take away from the excitement of the song’s release. The Beatles performed it live on the Our World broadcast, which was the first live television broadcast to reach multiple countries. 

“The Our World broadcast was great, going out to hundreds of millions of people around the world,” Ringo Starr said. “It was the first worldwide satellite broadcast ever. It’s a standard thing that people do now; but then, when we did it, it was a first. That was exciting; we were doing a lot of firsts. They were exciting times.”

They invited other artists like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Graham Nash. Starr felt the song perfectly captured the mood of the broadcast.

“You can see the happy faces,” he said. “I had Keith Moon next to me. Everyone was joining in — it was a fabulous time, both musically and spiritually. And for that show, the writers of the song were masters at hitting the nail on the head.”

The song was a success for the band

Though John Lennon wrote the song quickly and it got the band in a bit of hot water with another record label, it was an overall success. It became an anthem for the summer of 1967.

“All You Need Is Love’ went straight to Number One,” road manager Neil Aspinall said. “l think that it expressed the mood of the time, with Flower Power and all that whole movement. It really was ‘all you need is love’ time.”