McDonald's: Steady As She Goes?

I keep hearing and seeing this McDonald's commercial that demonstrates how eating food from McDonald's will eventually let you pimp your ride, transforming it from a rusted-out multi-primered heap into a sweet restored classic. I'm not sure how the economics of this work, unless the car owner had usually taken his meals at the drive-through Lobster, Truffles, & Caviar place down the street. But that's not my problem with this commercial.

No, my problem is with the music that plays throughout, a light, trippy little keyboard riff that sounds an awful lot like "Steady, As She Goes" by the Raconteurs:

(I just found out this morning, coincidentally and completely by accident, that The Raconteurs is a side-project of Jack White of The White Stripes. I had no idea - and I've seen the other version of this video, which features him very prominently.)

I hear this sort of thing a lot. Major corporations of the sort who vigorously defend any infringement on their own intellectual property will flaunt the law by using music that is similar to but ever-so-slightly different from the popular music of the day. I remember back in 1992 hearing a commercial for, I think, the U.S. Army using a twisted version of U2's "Mysterious Ways." Currently there's a car commercial using a chopped and shuffled version of Kid Rock's "Bawitdaba":

(Anyone who is surprised at the direction Kid Rock's life went in subsequent years obviously wasn't paying attention to the lyrics to this song. Note: this was one of the coolest songs I ever saw danced to at a strip bar, at one of the coolest strip bars I've ever been to. I wonder if it's still around?)

So, what's the deal?

Once upon a time it was considered the height of selling out for a band to have its music appear in a commercial. Eventually it came to be the mark of success, and then the standard. Republica and Spacehog might never have achieved the commercial success of other bands, but "Ready to Go" and "In the Meantime" both found later life in car commercials, adding a bit of revenue to someone's pockets. Jewel's "Intuition" was seemingly written as a tie-in to the launch of a new women's razor, while Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten" has seen a host of commercial and public-service applications.

But what about the use of similar-sounding songs or pieces of songs? Are these corporations (and the U.S. Army) using this music only after getting the approval of the copyright holder and paying the appropriate fees? I doubt it. So why aren't the studios and the others whose intellectual and creative property is being exploited for commercial gain without remuneration to them? Is there a legal loophole that allows the use of similar-sounding music that is sufficiently different to not be considered a direct cover? I don't know.