As many of you may know, One Direction is a British boy band popular with young/teenaged girls and women, who formed in 2010 on the show The X Factor. Simon Cowell’s Syco Records signed them to a £2 million ($255.5m) contract in the same year. This band has, however, been under fire over the course of the four years they’ve been a band, with accusations of them copying four songs and the name of the band. It isn’t OK to copy music, but it won’t stop.

There have been claims the One Direction’s songs have too many similarities to many classic songs including the songs “Summer Nights” from the musical Grease, the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” have all had claims that One Direction sampled elements for their songs.

If you listen to the songs, they do have some similarities, like the One Direction’s Best Song Ever which shows the same opening chords as Baba O’Riley. It seems that One Direction, or whoever wrote their songs, intentionally copied those cords in order to either save time or because they thought they could get away with it. It is believable, as using other people’s ideas is common in the music industry. Other bands, including Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, even the Beatles have all had claims made against them that they sampled music. Does that make what One Direction is doing okay? No. Will it continue? Yes. Music writing is hard to do, and anyone who can write something original deserves awards and praise, since finding a truly idea that hasn’t been taken before is very difficult.

So one cannot really blame One Direction, as you cannot expect much from a band pieced together from different X-Factor contestants for Simon Cowell’s benefit. Perhaps the world may never see another best-selling album like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, 1973, but we can hope an original idea exists somewhere.