They stole the hook from Marvin’s song. It wasn’t just a bridge line.
That being said, how does one create anything without repeating what has been done before? DO I think that they intentionally ripped Marvin’s hook, hard to say. HAve to be there when it was written and/or produced.
At one time CCR sued John Fogerty for writing a song that sounded like a CCR song ... written by John Fogerty.
I would think the laws should reflect that at some point widely distributed music has entered the public conscience and maybe the kids don’t get to sue for royalties 30 years after Dad dies.
Before media corporations convinced Congress, the courts, and to judge from FR postings a lot of ordinary people that every cultural artifact should be a source of monopoly rents for someone (usually *not* the actual artist, but instead a big media corporation, though in this case it’s an artistic estate) for on average more than a century after it was created (okay maybe not if artists die young, but close), reusing bits of other composers music — chord progressions, bass patterns, rhythmic patterns, yes, even melodies (Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini, anyone?) was not called “stealing”, but “learning from” or “writing a tribute to”.
This ruling if not overturned on appeal is destructive of the very Constitutional purpose of copyright, which (along with patents) is supposed to promote progress in the arts and sciences, not impede it by making every act of artistic creation that draws upon existing culture into a matter of legal negotiation and litigation with “rightsholders” who are usually not themselves artists, but publishers or artistic estates. Of course I feel the current copyright regime even before this ruling was destructive of the Constitutional purpose of copyright for very much the same reason and would very much like to see copyright returned to the condition the Founders copied from the British Law of Queen Anne, which like the first American copyright law provided a term of 14 year, renewable by the author (or artist), not his publisher, not his children, just the actual artist for another 14 years.