While your social media feeds were clogged with rants about MELANIA TRUMP reblogging a MICHELLE OBAMA speech without giving the FIRST LADY credit, mine were overflowing with people wondering if FREDDIE MERCURY might rise from the grave to strangle MELANIA's husband for continuing to use QUEEN's "WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS" as his walk-on music long after MERCURY's living bandmates started complaining about it. "We are frustrated by the repeated unauthorized use of the song after a previous request to desist," the band said on TUESDAY in a bit of restrained legalese that translates, more or less, to "Bismillah! No!" But here's the weird thing about that: No one seems to know for sure if such usage is legal or not. "This is a legal issue that has existed for 30 years, yet there still is no clear answer," intellectual property lawyer DAVID CLARK writes on his Generic Fair Use blog. There are a variety of rights issues in play, all of them complicated. The right of publicity, which is "untested in the political realm," and the principle of "false endorsement" might apply here. And they might not. Ask three lawyers and three music publishers and you may get seven answers. You might as well ask them, "Scaramouche, scaramouche, will you do the fandango?" But for anyone running for a job that, among many other things, puts them in charge of enforcing the country's laws – including the messy and complicated ones that govern publishing rights -- here's a solid bit of advice from ASCAP: Ask for permission. If producers of independent movies on micro budgets can figure out how to do it, then you, the candidate for the job of producer of a country with a very very big budget, can figure out how to do it, too... Speaking of U.S. laws, here's DAVID LOWERY on "6 Real Problems in Music Business the DOJ Should Be Investigating" instead of revisiting the ASCAP/BMI consent decrees... And here's a cool look into how NORTH KOREANS experience music, navigating between the traditional folk music that is literally inescapable ("beige radios without tuners or off switches") and the illicit SOUTH KOREAN pop music for which they risk severe punishment... Speaking of radios without tuners or off switches, my dad spent two years stationed in SOUTH KOREA and I subsequently grew up listening to him sing "ARIRANG," the national folk song of both KOREAs, with some frequency. Hearing it today in any form -- there are an estimated 3,600 variations -- is one of the most beautiful sounds in my world. I wish you a day of your own most beautiful sounds.