Lukeda420 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
is there a hard and fast technical rule that adjudicators must go by when evaluating these things? like "three notes is coincidental but four is not?"
In short no. There are a lot of different factors involved from how similar the sheet music is to how much access did the defendant have to the song in question.
Another thing that's somewhat related. Plagiarism in music wasn't an issue with folk singers and troubadours in the past. Musicians would routinely play other people songs and put their own spin on them. It was a common and accepted practice. It's one of the reasons why so many old folks songs don't have a writer attached to them, no one knows who they are.
We really need to overhaul our copyright laws. They were created in a time were the problem was publishers printing books without paying the author, it had nothing to do with stealing characters or musical phrases or whatnot. The fact is the ideal of stealing ideas doesn't mesh with how the creative process works, folk music more accurately reflects that. Actual innovations are always fairly minor.
25 Jun 2016, 8:33 pm
