During the Republican primary contest with Marco Rubio earlier in the year, Charlie Crist's campaign reportedly made use of the 1985 Talking Head song Road to Nowhere. It was allegedly used without permission on a website and on YouTube ads promoting Crist's candidacy (Crist has since dropped out of the Republican race and will run as an independent candidate).
Talking Heads frontman David Byrne is seeking $1m in damages. The suit was filed Monday in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa.

According to Byrne's lawyer, the Crist campaign did not obtain the synchronisation licence required to play one of Byrne's compositions, nor the master use licence for the original Talking Heads recording. Crist's ad may have also violated the Lanham Act by falsely implying Byrne's endorsement of the governor.

During the presidential campaign the McCain/Palin campaign also got into trouble for using songs without permission. Some of the songs they ran into problems with included John Cougar Mellencamp's Pink Houses... Chuck Berry's Go, Johnny, Go... Abba's Take a Chance On Me and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty.

Foo Fighters, Boston, Van Halen and Heart have also had their music lifted without permission. You would think that after a series of incidents involving Republican freeloaders, the message would be hitting home with the politicians, but apparently not.
Byrne learned of the use of Road to Nowhere via a friend after Crist's ad was already up and running. He said he was "pretty upset by that." He had Warner Bros. Records contact the Crist campaign and the ad was subsequently withdrawn.
Despite the withdrawal of the ad Byrne believes "... the damage had already been done by it being out there. People that I knew had seen (the ad), so it had gotten around. He added that the suit "is not about politics...It's about copyright and about the fact that it does imply that I... endorsed him [Crist] and whatever he stands for."
Byrne said he hasn't allowed his material to be used in ads because "I still believe songs occasionally mean something to people... A personal and social meaning is diluted when that same song is used to sell a product or a politician."
Byrne's lawyer, Lawrence Iser, successfully sued McCain for using the Jackson Browne tune Running on Empty without permission. After that case the Republican party reportedly agreed to respect copyright arrangements and artists' rights. Iser said: "To have it happen again in January is fairly shocking... They can't say, 'We didn't know that you have to get a licence to use songs in commercials' ... They absolutely did know."

Link also to Guardian - Rolling Stone - Billboard