Someone tried copyrighting all the possible pop music melodies. "Most pop melodies run fewer than 12 notes. If you generated every possible melody with just the eight notes of the C scale, that’d be 8^12 melodies, which is 68,719,476,736." So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain.
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
Note that "standard melody #3473" was literally exactly how European medieval church music was (and still is) categorized. There are 7 notes in the scale and certain rules that eliminate some possible sequences, but the space of possible canti firmi was finite and studied as a closed space by medieval music theorists.
There were monks whose job was to chant various psalms at specific tempos through the night so they would know when it was 4am to wake up the cook so he could start breakfast. I don't know if I could ever hate music, but that would get me close.
This sent me down a rabbit hole; I would love to see your source I can't find any. The idea that someone might carefully pace their recital in order to keep accurate track of time across several hours is threshold-hard to believe. It seems _possible_ but unlikely, and the kind of story which is likely to grow with retelling.
The closest mention I can find is this [1]:
> Early monastic rules say little about how time was determined, though the Rule of the Master notes that pairs of monks took turns, in weekly shifts, trying to stay awake while the others slept in order to awaken the abbot on time. Several possibilities for deter- mining that time are likely, however, including the use of calibrated candles or lamps of oil, [...] the recitation of a certain number of psalms, [etc]
However, here is it only mentioned as a possibility, not an actuality, and no sources are provided.
There appear to have been several orders who practiced 24-hour prayer by taking shifts, see for example the Acoemetae [2]. Here we do have Monks staying up all night reciting psalms but I can't find any indication that the prayers themselves were used to keep track of time.
The only reference to prayer-as-timekeeping that I can find seems to be in Medieval recipe books [3], which apparently would say things like boil this fish for as long as it takes to recite the lords prayer three times. Dead-reckoning works well on such short time-scales!
Even as early as the 500s there appear to have been timekeeping methods accurate enough to tell that dawn was approaching. When the skies are clear you can read this from the stars and accurate-enough water clocks have been in Europe since ~ the 500s. So there doesn't seem to be a need to perfect the act of spending hours reciting psalms at the right tempo.
Oy... medieval music theory is such a huge subject that I couldn't begin to do it justice in a HN comment. The short version is that some time in the 9th century monks developed neumes, an early form of musical notation, to write down the chants they chanted at different times of the day. Medieval music theorists classified those chants according to the last note (what we now call the "tonic") and the most common note (what we now call the "dominant"). There were 262144 theoretically possible melodies (8 notes long, 6 possible notes, but some were rejected for music-theoretic reasons so the actual space was rather smaller) which could be indexed by their sequence in a collated list of melodies ("on the Sunday after Pentacost sing the 7th chant in the Lydian mode" or whatever).
If I had to pick a "best-of" reading list, I'd say the 9th-century "Musica Enchiriadis", Berno's "Prologus in Tonarum", and Boethius's "De Institutione Musica". These all assume a familiarity with Platonic music theory, so at least skim through Plato's "Timaeus" first. There will also be more references to astronomy than will make sense to somebody in the modern age, because music and astronomy were believed to be essentially the same thing. Also more recent research has found that actual musicians of the time seem to have completely ignored the theorists. Some things never change.
In the 18th Century Presbyterian Church, they only sang Biblical psalms set to simple (but distinct) tunes and without any musical accompaniment. This was known as exclusive psalmody.
The psalms weren't the prose-style you'll find in any print Bible though, they were their own translation called the Metrical Psalms. Its 1650 edition proved very long lasting.
Many of these psalms were set to common metre, meaning that if you found such a psalter and tried singing it to some well-known tune it will very likely 'fit' the lyrics. You could try Psalm 23 set to the tune of The British Grenadiers, or Amazing Grace, or even The Star-Spangled Banner: https://thewestminsterstandard.org/psalm-23/
This was actually how the psalms were practised by congregations in my home country. The psalm lyrics were considered too sacred for practice, so they set the same tunes to other (sometimes comical) lyrics and practised those during the week. Then on Sunday the minister would say something like 'we will now sing Psalm xx to the tune of lilies', and the congregation would know the tune even if they hadn't memorised the psalm lyrics.
Still happening in the Free Church of Scotland. They have psalters with pages split horizontally, so you have the words at the top and the tune at the bottom.
People fish in the ocean and think that the fish is theirs. Huge companies do that and they act and profit as the fish is theirs. But isn’t the (now depleted) fish something that belongs to humanity. For popular music is so much you can pull out of the pond, in my opinion it can hardly be somewhere own property. Maybe a too advanced thought? When the white man landed in America they said this is ours, the aborigines reply. Yes, meaning this belongs to everyone and it is yours too. Can we transcend this ownership thing?
We are just pathetic as a wild animal, and don’t come with the “our brain is our weapon” because 80% (yes i made that number) of the humans cannot even start a fire on the wild let alone build a shelter, pick food that won’t poison them, fabricate tools and weapons out of the environment.
And yet, you will go sleep tonight pretty sure that the only other animal that could possibly get into your home and kill you is another human. Most humans live their whole lives without having felt like being the prey not even once in their lives.
As individuals, most of us are not that impressive, or as you say, we are downright pathetic. But our power is in our societal organization, and our inherited culture.
Well that's complicated by the fact that bears are often eating other animals, so I think their general philosophy is, if you're powerful enough to take it and keep it, it belongs to you.
There is a reason the pen is considered mightier than the sword.
A blade kills an enemy while it's wielder is alive, fit, and wielding it in anger.
The pen shapes the very thinking of entire generations. Anyone who says the space of violence is disjunct from the space of words is a downright fool. Hell, politics is just violence in it's Sunday/Friday/Saturday best.
The exact same logic applies to many things that by rights ought to be commons, but are not. Most notably: land.
The idea that, for example, any person claiming sole ownership/usufruct of a piece of land owes to the public a rent for the value of the undeveloped land is called Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism).
Maybe the fish should be the property of society and the location of the fish is the catchers right, with safe handling and responsible returns being their responsibility?
Step one and two describe how Society currently works in civilized countries. The fishing territorial Waters belong to the nation, and fisherman are licensed to use it.
I don't know what you mean by responsibility here. In the current system fisherman are incentivized to catch fish by the profit* from selling them, which they pay taxes on. You need incentives because picking people and forcing them to be responsible for fishing would be slavery
Even if the claim that most pop melodies consist of 12 notes is true (which is dubious), the 8^12 number excludes variation in rhythm or the timing between the notes which can make a significant impact on the overall feeling of the melody. If you hum/whistle some pop song you know in your head, it is easy to see that the notes aren’t all equally spaced apart in time.
A copyright claim doesn't mean you've copied anything. I can submit a DMCA takedown for any video on youtube by filling out a form [0] and it's fairly likely the video will be pulled.
Seems pretty easy to identify the song it's based on to me (and the original composer even threatened to sue). The rhythm's also pretty similar though.
It's an interesting case though because they are clearly different songs. I listened to that song for many years and never once made the connection to the other one until I heard the live version played with the special ending.
take a popular song, change the rhythm and timing and maybe change the middle bridge part and change all the lyrics to be something you wrote yourself and wait if you get a copyright claim.
"The copyright system is abused" is a very different claim than "the use of rhythm, rests, and timing greatly increases the original melody space". It's odd to refute one with the other.
no but look at how this very simple difference will lead to you being sued is very similar to look at how this very simple difference but slightly less simple than the other one and more of a real world scenario really will keep you from being sued.
It's very odd to not see the similarity between the two claims and how one exists as a critique of the other.
Agree, but a jury just needs to decide a song sounds similar for it to be a copyright infringement. So a jury may hear the same melody and exclude the variation in their comparison.
And that is clearly defined by writing down the notes. The length and the space between. That is the reason why we have the 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, … notes. On how those notes are connected and so on.
Well, he could mean that some notes are connected (where I think we all mean the 8 notes are of equal measure). So between every two consecutive notes you can add a line, multiplying the space by 2^7
with a 4/4 (which is most of music is these days) there's only so much slicing you can do to have relative times between notes differ.
There are also a number of things that change the expression but not the melody. eg Hallelujah vs Zombie:
- have different melodies but use the same chords
- can be sliced and diced both with various rests and palm mutes and arpeggios and strumming yet still have them individually identifiable (and sometimes very close, possibly even overlapping in some sections, but that's perfectly normal and how one does a good mashup)
Even the time signature doesn't mean much, one could play Zombie on a blues shuffle and it would still be distinctively Zombie-esque.
Throw in music theory and keys and I IV V and chords and whatnot which I still don't master but I get the idea, it severely reduces what one ought to do to compose something enjoyable.
With that you can mathematically reduce you problem space to some extent.
In any case it's all completely moot because fundamentally the creation process is a) ingest ideas, b) digest, c) excrete ideas, which ultimately come from a mixture of a). Everything new looks like something else to some extent, and there's a fundamental reason why artists are told (or themselves tell) they're "influenced by" this or that other artist.
If we were to truly strictly enforce copyright nothing would ever get created anymore. So I don't know if copyright itself is right or wrong, but I feel copyright enforcement is truly fucked up these days (and not just in music)
As a beginner composing in my living room I'm truly scared (on top of fear of inadequacy) to push something out there I put my heart and soul into and get sued to oblivion (or at the very least have it destroyed and claimed by some entity that is not even involved in creation)
That ignores rhythm and chords which are important and distinct. Also given current court rulings stating such non-creative computer generated things are not copyrightable, it's irrelevant to copyrighted music.
Not generally. Prior art works like that for patents. For copyright the courts generally allow copyrights on things created independently of an existing item. So it's likely the whole exercise is worthless at affecting any future copyrights.
100,000 tracks seems like an awfully low estimate, how did you arrive at that number? Just as a spot check, I've liked ~6500 individual tracks, and it would be very surprising if that represented 6% of their total catalog - I'd expect that actual percentage to be orders of magnitude lower.
Emphasis is regarded as an interpretation of the notes. Interpretation doesn't invalidate the claims of the original author according how copyright is currently applied.
It's like interpreting Shakespeare. You can emphasis this sentence over that one, and this word over that one. It is still Shakespeare.
I think this ignores what actually makes a pop song popular and a hit. It isn't the chord progression or melody, at least primarily. It is the marketing.
Plus, I assume that major studios have already been using stastical-based software for decades to help craft songs to fit the current vogue. There's a reason why many songwriters and producers write songs for Kpop and state those songs could never be released in the U.S.
I worked in the business for 15+ years and was involved in a lot of campaigns for artists and music you’ve heard a lot.
Everyone says this but once you get in the actual music business you end up seeing the vast amount of stuff that gets the exact same amount of marketing, checks all the boxes, has all the right people and money behind it, and goes absolutely fucking nowhere.
You realize very quickly it’s not really about the marketing. People get to decide what music they like, and do.
That doesn’t mean bad music doesn’t get popular. It does. You just don’t like the taste of the massive number of people that enjoy it.
I get it I can’t fucking explain Pitbull either. I want it to be a conspiracy.
Standard rules of business normally apply to anything sold.
1. Product gotta be good enough to compete with other similar products
2. Price low-price, middle or premium, but it needs to fit the category
3. Place make it easy to find and purchase
4. Promotion tell the people who need this thing, all about it
If any of these are wrong you don't get market success.
But there are a lot of non-linearities.
Old Marketing joke:
"I know half of my budget is not working, I just don't know which half"
> You realize very quickly it’s not really about the marketing. People get to decide what music they like, and do.
I am not convinced. And it isn't about a conspiracy. These are sort of emergent phenomena and statistics. It doesn't mean every single pop song marketed in the same way will be a success. But I guarantee that there is correlation between major studios and their marketing and the average success of their songs. There's also other aspects such as paid advertising occurring in a song's lyrics and music videos, and this happens in movies as well. See: https://www.mic.com/articles/118974/pop-music-is-more-about-.... And that was several years ago. I imagine that's even worse these days. It certainly is for movies, but I don't listen to enough popular music to know.
A lot of this is about catching waves of sentiment and taste. The same thing happens in other industries, like fashion or furniture. For example, right now, you'll find a lot of furniture items coming in this sort of dusty rose pink. It feels like it came out of nowhere. So there's a snowball effect to how tastes change but then who can ride that and market towards where it's headed. I think that is as much as a part of a song's success than it's songwriting. Then there's a self-sustaining aspect of it, like that found in Max Martin's work. He's the goto guy, so artists go to him, so then people listen to his music, and then he remains the goto guy. His main talent, more so than his songwriting and production skills, is his ability to ride these waves of sentiment I mentioned. Couple that with the self-sustaining aspect, and you get his career.
I have watched several interviews of Kpop producers, many of which are western. They explicitly state that the songs they sell to the Kpop industry would not get bought and marketed in the U.S. by studios and artists. Yet, there are plenty of people who love Kpop music, and when people are introduced to it, they love it. So I believe those songs could be liked in the U.S. by western artists, but they aren't marketed.
It takes a lot of work to find good music that you like, and it almost never is on the figurative radio.
> “But Riehl and Rubin’s point, they say, is not actually to obtain legally sound copyrights, but to illustrate that there are a finite number of ways to combine notes to create pop melodies, and these combinations existed before any songwriter actually put them to paper. All of these melodies can be generated and represented mathematically, suggesting that writing the melody for a pop song is, in some ways, a lot like selecting and portraying a pre-existing—and non-copyrightable—mathematical fact.”
Some deep concepts right there. Would the same thing apply to any sequence of things? The AACS cryptographic key? The words in a book? Is there some breakpoint in number of permutations where human creativity and memorable history allow for copyright?
So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain
Not really though. If this were accepted as a creative work, then it also violates the copyright of every modern song. But, as exemplified the the story in the OP, where the author gets the idea from is really important. So, you could look a jury in the eye and say you were just browsing through a hard drive full of melodies and picked one that seemed good, but that likely isn't going to fly.
It's a neat idea, but copyright protects against copying, if someone copies your work, even if your work is derived from the public domain, then you have reasonable grounds on which to sue. You'd have to have added something creative to the public domain melody, however.
In short copying from the public domain does not make one's whole work public domain.
This maybe helps against specious claims?
It may be useful to consider how Pantone's copyright on shades of colour relates; they don't get to sue people for using those colours (in general).
Pantone doesn't get its money from copyrighted nuance names. They get it from putting together and selling all the processes and chemicals which deliver you the exact same color over all thinkable media. How would this translate in the musical world?
I think they meant to write 100,000,000. I was about to say that sounds insanely low, because I have 15k songs "Liked" on Spotify and there's no way I've liked 15% of practically all songs.
Even 100.000.000 isnt all songs. There is still loads of music missing, with changes hppening every now and then as labels pulls specific band lineups not covered by their agreements with Spotify.
There is nothing by eg The Blues Brothers outside the two movies and their debut album. Nothing by Spocks Beard prior to Neal Morse leaving the band. Other albums are stripped of specific songs because a guest artist wasnt part of the overall deal.
There are probably countless other examples as well, and as artists are moving away from physical media completely I fear that entire artist will disappear in the future because they happened to be pulled from streaming services.
On the other hand, there are countless recordings of the same songs by covers bands, different recordings of the same classical pieces, etc. https://forgotify.com/ should give a good idea of what the long tail on Spotify is.
The defence would be that you copied from the public domain to make a derivative work, the other aspects -- timing, lyrics, repitition, instruments used, etc. -- would be where your copyright lay. You couldn't successfully sue someone for using that sequence of notes on your melody (common ancestor) but could if the result shared your timing or other aspects; provided those choices passed the bar for making a creative work.
My only nitpick is I don't think you need AI or machine learning for automatic music generation. Instead, we've allowed tastes to be so dumbed down you could achieve success with MIDI, a RNG and a couple of if/then statements.
Copyright cases around music are a great demonstration of many of the problems caused by our approach to intellectual property:
* Artists are generally inspired by other artists and societal context.
* Most artists make very little, some become fabulously wealthy.
* Artists with few resources must be extremely careful not to "infringe" the copyright of a powerful artist.
* Powerful artists have access to legal resources that allow them to, intentionally or unintentionally, take from smaller artists without facing similar repercussions.
There is a complete failure of the system to acknowledge that people produce similar works independently or that human progress has often been driven by conscious or subconscious inspiration.
The current regime would have us paying royalties to the dynasty of the guy that came up with the wheel. I don't think there's any justification that we'd be better off as a society if that were the case.
On top of that, many cases (including this one) aren't even artists suing other artists. They're estates or companies that bought the rights suing. Oftentimes the creators themselves would be aghast at this!
Oftentimes the creators themselves would be aghast at this!
Obviously anyone who has sold the rights to their music gives up that particular claim that though.
And (in my opinion) the rights of any musician should die with them, so if they haven't sold the rights to their music while they're alive their music can't fall into the hands of a private equity company.
Making an exception to limit a musicians choice of what to do with their property would just be anti-musician.
I.e. musicians should be able to pass on their assets like anyone else.
Creating rat’s nests of laws to fix things in ways that are not thoughtfully deep and wide only further separates the rights of the rich, who can afford legal strategists to dodge narrow scope laws, from everyone else.
What is needed are judicial judgements that uphold sensible outcomes, and provide relief (and deterrence) against frivolous speculative litigation.
The need for an open system of informed human judgement, to settle fuzzy boundaries based on relevant particulars, is one of the primary purposes of a judicial systems.
Micromanaging laws introduce massive opportunities for gaming and unintended harm. And create parasitic constituencies that become devoted to maintaining Byzantine situations.
Musicians aren't a special case. The problems that exist everywhere are just more apparent due to their prominence in the public space and how universal music is as a form of expression.
We shouldn't make an exception for musicians. We should relax intellectual property law everywhere.
Copyright and patents have an age limit - for good reasons. If anyone would have a patent for the wheel, it would have expired by now - letting everyone use the design for free.
Copyright restrictions are so lengthy that only people born at the tail-end of the author's life will ever be able to build on that work. Take the Lord of the Rings for example: Tolkien has been dead for half a century, the society that recognised and popularised his work is largely dead, having had no opportunity to contribute to, or build on it.
The idea that society has raised multiple generations of people who weren't even alive contemporaneously with the author doesn't sit well personally.
I see Ed Sheeran's (as well as Katy Perry's) successful copyright defenses as evidence song writers are doing fine. Katy Perry's earlier defeat (for Dark Horse) luckily reversed on appeal last year. Toni Basil also had an interesting copyright victory last year related to 1980's "Mickey" - although her result seems very narrow and technical (related to copyright termination and works-for-hire) and only about the recording, since she never wrote the song in the first place.
Whereas Marvin Gaye's heirs' successful litigation against Blurred Lines is very concerning (see: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2018/07/blurred-lines-b... ), although as has long been the case with copyright litigation in the USA - it really all depends on the jury !
Personally, when I listen to Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" right next to "Blurred Lines" I really cannot comprehend the jury's result. I guess they both employ a cowbell very prominently? But I wasn't a member of the jury, so it wasn't up to me. I find the Katy Perry result to be at least a little bit of a close call based on my own listening.
Honestly, I think if I wrote something significant enough that I got sued for it - that's probably a VERY good sign about my own prospects and future as a musician.
Lil Nas X was completely independent when he created Old Town Road with a complete copy & paste of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's music. So even in cases of absurdly blatant copyright infringement the artist might still do okay !
You don't have to be large or even get sued for them to affect you. Gyu Beats had a video where he recreated Aphex Twin's "Ageispolis" from scratch. And Die Antwoord's label copyright-claimed all revenue from that video because Die Antwoord sampled Ageispolis (unedited, with permission). It's likely an automated copyright claim, but does that make it any better?
If Aphex Twin copyright-claimed the song that would be another thing. But this is like if someone else sampled Ghosts 34 and Lil Nas X claimed original copyright ownership of the sample.
You can argue legal merits all day but the reality is the little guy doesn't have much chance against FAANG lawyers without a lot of financial backing from elsewhere
That is part of the rules required of distribution sites like YouTube, Apple Music, Spotify, etc., as defined in US law as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). Hence the name "DCMA Takedown Notice".
The Reznor/Ross track that Old Town Road was built from carries a Creative-Commons Non-Commercial license.
But Old Town Road is obviously commercial. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross currently receive a significant portion of the royalties (more than Lil Nas X!).
> Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross currently receive a significant portion of the royalties (more than Lil Nas X!).
Do you have any source on this? Reznor has stayed mostly quiet about Old Town Road aside from mentioning it was strange at first but he doesn't really mind it. They worked out a deal but I don't think the terms were ever made public. Could he have demanded a large share of the royalties? Sure. But do you have proof he did?
Until 2019, 100% of the royalties for the song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve, released in 1997 and their most recognizable song, went to the Rolling Stones. The Verve sampled the distinctive repeating string theme in that song from the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time", released in 1965. The Verve even got permission to use the riff from the 'Stones record label prior to releasing "Bitter Sweet Symphony."
Marvin Gaye's estate is one of the most notorious copyright trolls in the music industry. We've only heard about the big songs (Sheeran, Blurred Lines) but they've gone after a number of indie musicians as well.
> I mean, you're supposed to ask permission to make a cover.
No, that’s actually a specific carve-out in US copyright law dating back to the Copyright Act of 1909.
It’s certainly a nice thing to do (like weird al and parodies), but it’s not required, and it’s completely useless for a budding singer to “ask permission” to do a cover from a popular artist or group, the request will go straight to the bin unread.
> That's kind of their choice?
Of course it is, but a copyright strike is a heavy handed and damaging choice. The Eagles are apparently notorious for this behaviour.
Keep in mind that whilst you don't need to ask permission, you do need to obtain a mechanical license and I have a sneaking suspicion that many of the artists covering (particularly on YouTube) haven't done this.
Keep in mind that a mechanical license wouldn't cover you on YouTube anyway - once you're making a video for your cover you now need a sync license which you do need permission for.
You don't need permission to make a cover, in America, there's a thing called a compulsory mechanical licence that anyone can obtain. Prince was notorious for "denying" people permission to cover his songs, but in reality it seemed that people were just being polite, and/or afraid of his general power in the industry (said with the full awareness that he both took a battering from Warner Bros and also meted out much battering to his own fans).
There is an automated system for requesting and getting approval for covers, if you want to "cover" your ass while covering a song. (Ahem.) It basically says "yes" and logs the fact that you requested it so you have proof that you fit in the cover carve out you reference.
NOTE: This was explained to me by a musician/producer. I don't have firsthand knowledge of the system.
Only if you sell it. The Eagles will copyright claim an hour long video with 5 seconds worth of a cover of their songs. So you either take the video down, send all monetization to the Eagles for the entire video, or remove the 5 seconds.
> send all monetization to the Eagles for the entire video
From the last instance I’ve seen that wasn’t even an option, the video was struck down and that was it.
Granted that was a cover not just a small bit of cover inside a longer video, but the cover-er specifically noted the Eagles opted to neither revenue-share (which was the cover’s state as it’d been properly content-id’d as a cover) nor demonetise, just take down the video entirely.
He also cites Rick Beato as having repeatedly had analysis of Eagles songs taken down.
Though maybe it’s because YouTube only has revenue sharing, you can’t send 100% revenue to the eagles?
Given their experience in signing off on a bad, exploitative deal at the inception of their careers, and the fight they had to get control of their songwriting catalog from David Geffen, I really can't be surprised.
Once (at least!) burned, forever shy. And they're not wrong: what YouTube does is also exploitative. Anybody on YouTube who's building a career on publicising the reprocessing of other people's music in any way, is building on sand. In no way are they any better off than the Eagles were under their original contracts.
Leaving the question, is it better to do react videos on Creedence because the owners aren't issuing copyright strikes, when you know that Creedence was robbed?
Ah yes, “we’ve been burned therefore we’ll be taking the risk of getting you banned from the platform you’re trying to make a following and money on”. That sounds so nice of them.
Not precisely (or at least not in this instance), from TFA:
> The claim over Thinking Out Loud was originally lodged in 2018, not by Gaye’s family but by investment banker David Pullman and a company called Structured Asset Sales, which has acquired a portion of the estate of Let’s Get It On co-writer Ed Townsend.
I think Sheeran was lazy and lifted Gaye song too close. But since it's the estate trying to milk everybody without real respect to Marvin Gaye's legacy[0] .. I'm ok with them losing.
A friend of mine who is a managing partner at a law firm specializing in IP law once told me that "once a case goes to a jury trial, it's a 50/50 chance that you win--and the odds only go down from there."
Amusingly, Warner Music themselves can't tell the difference between Dark Horse and Joyful Noise (the song supposedly being infringed upon in Dark House)
I've only really looked into the case involving “Thinking Out Loud” and Marvin Gaye's song, “Let's Get It On". I'm not music buff, but when you listen to them, they are completely different. There is no similarity at all.
Sheeran's claim to the court he was going to quit music stuck me as beside the point - I hope the jury didn't hear that, lest it influence their verdict. The question for them was if there was infringement. There obviously wasn't.
This meritless lawsuit was always going to fail. But Sheeran was fortunate to have deep pockets. He can afford to defend meritless lawsuits. The bigger issue is how to deal with large companies suing independent artists, and the consequences they should suffer for instituting meritless lawsuits.
The two songs are very similar in some ways -- similar enough that even Sheeran played them as a live medley. I think the strongest argument is that the common elements are mostly shared genre markers, and courts have consistently held that genre similarities aren't evidence of copying.
They have a similar (but not actually the same) chord progression. They're in a different key and the melody is different. If you could copyright similar chord progressions then that would be the end of new pop music.
> similar enough that even Sheeran played them as a live medley
That doesn't really mean much, any good sounding diatonic (chords all from the same key) song is going to share the progression with lots of other songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
> If you could copyright similar chord progressions then that would be the end of new pop music.
And many other types of music.
But whether you "can" or "can't" copyright something doesn't really come in to play: I can sue anyone for anything, and as long as it's vaguely plausible so it won't get thrown out and my pockets are deep enough I can be a serious nuisance. Whether the claim is ridiculous or not is actually not all that important.
New pop music could still be made by record labels with a massive portfolio of existing music.
Basically the same way software patents work: you don’t have to worry about suing yourself, and MAD ensures you won’t get sued by any of the other big players. The next logical step is the rise of the nothing-to-lose patent/copyright troll. Get rights to some obscure piece, then start extracting payments
They're similar in terms of tempo, chord progression, chord rhythm, and chord voicing - despite that the second chord is actually subtly different between the two. When you transpose one, you can hear the similarities.
But that shouldn't even be close to enough to be infringement. I'm one to think they got Satriani/Coldplay wrong as well, though. There are just too many examples of songs that make really good mash-ups. 4 Non Blondes What's Going On and Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy, for instance. I'd say those are more similar that Sheeran/Gaye.
> There are just too many examples of songs that make really good mash-ups.
A few years ago Pomplamoose was really into mashups, and sometimes I had to remind myself these were two different songs. I just checked their channel, and their two most popular pieces are mashups (Sweet Dreams + Seven Nation Army, and Stayin’ Alive + Virtual Insanity)
What I love about the Satriani/Coldplay lawsuit was there was a third band, Creaky Boards, who first accused Coldplay of stealing their song a year before Satriani. You can still see posts on r/music as of less than a year ago talking about this.
However, wouldn't this mean Creaky Boards actually stole the song from Satriani?
Right. I don't think copyright should apply to similar songs, even intentionally similar songs. Musical traditions worldwide rely on imitation, elaboration, recontextualization of known works.
I really believe that Jamaica saw such a musical explosion (and continued cultural dominance) because of the "human" view of music creation. So much was about borrowing or reusing or repurposing. Lyrics subtly changed from other songs. Reusing melodies from other songs. Purposely having multiple artists do their take on "riddims" to make the song their own. It let anyone contribute and it increased the amount of creative production, not reduced it. And, what do we get out of subtle modifications and copying of previous tunes? A genre.
Meh, this is a parlor trick. The two songs have similar rhythms and chord progressions, that is all. There is probably not a single popular song ever written that didn't share those features with some other song out there somewhere. And two songs don't even have to be similar at all to be able to fram them together in a way that sounds coherent.
There are many songs that can cohere with "Let's Get It On", especially if you allow yourself to change tempos and keys, which you have to do in order to make "Thinking Out Loud" fit. In fact, if you allow all the diffs you have to employ to map LGIO onto TOL there are probably hundreds of songs you could fit either one to.
In fact, there is almost certainly a song (probably more than one) released before LGIO that you could map LGIO onto which LGIO would infringe by this standard.
I'm not exactly sure what we're arguing about, since Beato doesn't leave much doubt that it's not a ripoff. The keys are different, but the tempi are pretty darn close. Your "probably" is doing a lot of work here.
LGIO doesn't fit a pattern of "unknown artist writes something, sues the big artist only when he/she has a hit." LGIO was a big hit on its own.
Led Zeppelin settled this one, for an undisclosed sum.
Plagiarism is clearly a judgment call. I don't know if Townsend was willing to settle for a reasonable sum or not. Probably not, since they went to trial, which was just asking to end up with nothing.
Are we arguing? I think we're mostly in agreement about the main issue.
The only thing I think we might disagree on is that you attach more significance to the fact that LGIO and TOL sound coherent when you alternate between them than I do.
I'm not an expert on copyright law, but I think "derivative work" probably does describe TOL. However:
I believe the defendant is entitled to ask for a jury trial. Once that was granted, though, the plaintiffs should have settled. There's no way a jury is going to understand what a derivative work is, and a jury trial is horrendously expensive.
> More that Sheeran himself alternated between them in his concerts
I don't understand why you think that's relevant. No one disputes that the songs share a chord progression (modulo a key change), and so they make a good mashup. There is a lot of daylight between that and copyright infringement (or at least there ought to be IMHO).
> I think "derivative work" probably does describe TOL.
We'll have to agree to disagree about that too. IMHO four chords is not enough, not even remotely close. If it were, you could easily enumerate all possible distinct songs.
Heck, there are far fewer chords than there are English words, so there are far fewer four-chord progressions than there are four-word phrases. Do you think it should be possible to copyright four words?
I'm not positive it's a derivative work, and more importantly, I'm not positive that's even a concept in music copyright. And most importantly, I don't think any jury is going to convict on that.
That said:
Your example is a straw man. "No one disputes that the songs share a chord progression" -- no, that's not the argument. Look at that video: they share identical four opening bars.
The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work.
Consider "fan fiction." You take the same Star Trek NG characters and change some of the plot. It's still recognizably Star Trek NG. Yet people do get away with fan fiction these days, AFAIK.
So a judge trial would have ended differently; the judge would have ordered a small but significant payment. But going for a jury trial was a loser right from the start.
They are not even close to identical. They share openings that can be made to sound identical if you just play the sheet music with a few tweaks (like changing key) but if you listen to the actual recordings no one would have any trouble telling them apart. In fact, I'll bet if you played the opening bars of the actual recordings to someone who was not trained in music it would not even occur to them that they were similar in any way.
We could do an experiment: I'll bet I could find five songs that are similar enough to LGIO that if you played the original recordings of those songs along with TOL and LGIO to test subjects who had not heard any of those songs before, that they could not pick out TOL and LGIO as the allegedly infringing pair with odds better than chance.
> The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. An infringing work is an infringing work no matter how it was produced. Of course, the most likely way that an infringing work gets produced is by copying, but this is exactly the problem: the more you allow people to claim copyright over things with little information content (like a chord progression containing only three chords), and the broader a net you allow it to cast, the more likely it becomes that someone produces an infringing work by pure chance.
> people do get away with fan fiction these days
Only if they don't make money off of it.
> a judge trial would have ended differently
There is no way to know. But if you're right, then thank God for juries because sometimes that is our last bastion of defense against corporate overreach.
No idea. I didn't follow the trial. But one of the things I was originally responding to was "even Sheeran played them as a live medley" which is only relevant in the context of a performance, not a composition.
There shouldn't even be a copyright issue for a work released in 1971 - over 50 years ago. Surely the work should be in the public domain in any reasonable system.
Somewhat oddly this song fits into a weird slot in history:
“
A quirk of the law restricts which aspects of “Let’s Get It On” (1973) are under copyright. For many songs made before 1978, only the contents of the sheet music submitted to the Copyright Office (known as the “deposit copy”) are protected. With “Let’s Get It On,” that notation was skeletal: just chords, lyrics and a vocal melody. Other key aspects of the track, like its bass line and signature opening guitar riff, were absent.
That means the lawsuit primarily came down to the chord progressions of the two songs, which are nearly — but not entirely — identical.”
I think the law in the USA is that copyright is maintained until 70 years after the death of the writer/composer (unless it was a work-for-hire). So just another 31 years to go here (2054) assuming Marvin Gaye was the sole author.
Adam Neely does a better job, and includes multiple examples of other songs that Gaye could have "ripped off" by some definition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzLD-SAwW8
This is a bit frustrating because Neely did a better job covering the "Blurred Lines" case but Beato has more viewers, I guess.
I think this is actually the point. Sheeran was sued not because he made a song that sounded the same as another song, but because the song he made earned a lot of money.
So this problem only happens to rich musicians who have earned a lot of money making music. That doesn't make it right, or reasonable, obviously. But it also means that the vast majority of musicians will never have this problem. The whole "copyright is threatening music" headline is a little overblown. "Rich douchebags are using copyright to bully rich musicians with meritless court cases" would probably be more accurate.
I think your comment exposes more of the underlying point. Why are the courts letting these baseless claims through? If you become famous everyone suddenly comes out of the woodwork to make the argument that they want a piece of your pie. And as you get more popular, those claims just get more and more detailed and cover more absurd. That would be demoralizing to any artist, regardless of their popularity or success.
He was obviously making a very well considered and important contribution to the discussion and not at all dropping a variety of turds, both real and proverbial, whilst sitting on the can.
1M or so streams per month is still indie realm isn't it? And anyway, if it's less, that just makes the point harder: 'nobody is suing indie artists for the 70k they didn't make last year'.
This is my favourite rejoinder to the idea that "the chorus sounds really similar, it must be plagiarism!", from the KLF's "The Manual" (https://www.tomrobinson.com/resource/klf.txt):
We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no doubt, one will be better than the other.
Admittedly this is from a book that explicitly recommends ripping off other songs as the basis for your own short-lived masterpiece.
In the desert there is only a single place to drill for water, but there is enough water if you drill there to serve everyone.
The king, in an attempt to find this well, issues a proclamation, that whoever finds this place to drill will own all of the water that comes out of it for the rest of their lives.
Most of the desert dwellers recognize that searching for this well wont keep them fed in the meantime, so an enterprising young duke offers a different deal. He says that he will pay people to search for the well, in exchange for the rights to the water if they find it.
Many desert dwellers take him up on this deal, its a good job, and it pays well enough to subsidize the searching.
When the well is finally found, the king grudgingly hands the duke the rights to the water, and with the wealth that the exorbitant prices he charges for water brings him, the duke eventually owns the whole desert and deposes the king.
That's it, thats the whole story. If you thought it was stupid, and that the king should have done things differently, we are in agreement.
I think the king should have made the duke point out who actually found the water, and then the king should have stuck to his proclamation and awarded all of the rights to that person.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It doesn't say a transferable right. and "securing" and "exclusive" seem to argue against transferability. Beats me why the courts and congress decided otherwise.
> There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I find very sad the fact that pop songs have become nothing more than 4 chords just repeating over and over, with a thin veneer of inconsequential melody over them, serving a never ending stream of banal lyrics. Is this really the best of what award-winning musicians like Sheeran et al can do? I mean, they don't even bother changing the harmony for the chorus, and where has the bridge gone?
There is more to music than harmony and melody. Some styles of music even don't have harmony at all, like Indian classical music. Or have pitch at all, like some African styles of drum music.
If modern pop doesn't seem to focus on melody or harmony, it's interesting what it focuses on instead. It doesn't seem to be rhythm or form either. It might be the timbres of sounds (interesting singing voice, unique singing manerisms, or difference between clean or dirty bass, etc.), trying to create a unique listening experience on common speakers. There's a reason why physical instruments are used ever less in pop while use of human voice is ever more in the focus.
It might also not be the music at all but instead the lifestyle and drama surrounding the artists. In that case, all I have to say is that there's more than pop and there has never been more amazing music in all styles you can imagine being produced. It also has never been easier to find and access. If you're not listening to it yet, you probably don't care that much about harmony, melody and whatnot.
Oh, I'm right there with you man. Modern pop is mostly dreadful. I think music producers have homed in on "the most appealing chord progression possible", and are reluctant to deviate from it, like an arms race. What boggles my mind though, is that some people don't seem to get bored by it. Tbh modern pop isn't even really music any more, it's much more a multimedia thing - with visuals (hot performers, cool videos etc) playing a massive part in its appeal.
Always makes me laugh when people put on their "modern music is rubbish" hat to complain about the 'Axis of Awesome' progression which is a slight switcharound of what is widely known as the '50s progression' or 'oldies progression' because so many songs from the good old days when music was fresh and vibrant and performers had real talent used it...
When people say that older music was better, they don't mean that ALL older music is good. There was lots of crappy music in the "good old days"; the stuff they're talking about is the good part.
These days, there's really no good part, at least not pushed by the big music labels. There is some great stuff outside the US, or from independent artists, etc.
If you're technically talented, you don't need Autotune. Sounds like you're an argumentative asshole who just can't stand the idea of someone not liking your preferred music. When I find out someone doesn't like my preferred music, the last thing I do is try to change their mind.
It is subjective though. Personally I really enjoy it, even when most of it is just basic 3-chord stuff.
The reason for this is partly the liberation of production. Anyone with a laptop can produce a track that rockets in popularity. There's plenty of really interesting pop too like The Weeknd.
There has also been a shift in the purpose of music for young people. Putting aside the use of music in things like TikTok, young people have zeroed in on simplicity to communicate an emotion. Music is more ambient, designed to provide something that resonates emotionally but isn't intrusive. Almost a self-medication with music.
This is, I think, because music became more portable. If you can have music on for 8 of 12 hours in the day, are you going to be sat doing critical listening to classical or 1970s prog? No, you're going to put on a background vibe that makes you feel good.
It is easy to be cynical about the commercialisation of music, but there's no black or white, the reality is more nuanced and there's innovation going on not only with the sounds and production ... but also what music means.
Ignore young people at your peril, or you'll be an old cummudgeon who only listens to Pink Floyd or whatever and misses out on so much.
But.....you yourself called it "most appealing chord progression possible". If it's appealing, why is it surprising that it's POPular?
And I don't really see what is there to be bored with - it's just music. You put a POP playlist on Spotify or whatever and it's enjoyable music that you can have on for 8 hours while you work. If you want stuff that deviates from it, there's plenty to choose from - but I don't understand why anyone is surprised that this isn't what most people listen to.
Unfortunately, it's what makes Pop Music, POPular. As long as it sells, it won't change. I remember Lady Gaga getting a lot of criticism early on in her career, then later, she showed how talented she is musically.
On a sidenote, we see it on the web, you can argue that most marketing websites look the same, it follows a formula that sells.
There's an amazing amount of fantastic music and it's hard to even keep up. You should be able to find something you like! I've been enjoying Pomme lately.
Why judge people for what they like? There has never been more choice in music, listen to what you like and be happy that others are doing the same. I think the incredible amount of choice is the largest reason for why pop music has become so formulaic. People who are interested in music all have their own playlists so pop has to focus even more on people who are largely uninterested in the complexities of music.
My understanding is that "facts" can't be copyrighted. If there's only so many chord progressions that people find pleasing, and music taste is universal and we're born with it, wouldn't that make music more "fact-based"? Everyone will, more or less, agree on what is a pleasing progression.
I agree with everything you said except for the last sentence
You can orchestrate almost any progression to be pleasing or interesting - as there's far more to harmony than just choosing what chords go in what order
Chord voicings and the arrangement of the composition have far more of an impact on the final piece than just the ordering of chords
It's also very culturally relative - Classical North Indian harmony would sound awful (IMO) if you used more than one chord (in their case a Shruti box drone) under the piece
In a similar way, Jazz Musicians would insist the ii-V-I progression is the most useful of all time, not I-V-vi-IV like most pop/rock listeners
It's all relative to context and I-V-vi-IV is not as "universal" as all those magazine articles and blog posts will insist
Don't let the theory of harmony proposed by Bach and his dead German associates be the be all and end all of harmony
Some progressions are more popular than others (think of it like Sloane's Gap in mathematics), but there's certainly no teleology in music or its progressions!
The assumptions you make are incorrect. And even if they were, your conclusion is also incorrect.
Copyright does not require "pleasing". Only that the work have a minimum of human creativity. And courts have rules that is very minimal. Arranging otherwise uncopyrightabable facts can be enough.
Copyrighted works don't have to be unique, but it'll be real hard to prove independent invention.
I would check these premises. It was thought that harmony was universal until it was discovered that it wasn't. Then we thought octaves were universal, but apparently there were some tribes that didn't make the association. There's a lot that we're born into, but not necessarily born with.
An example of fact exhaustion is canons. They've been done a while, but there's been a lot of music made since when.
This (pre-court case result) video by Adam Neely (also a musician) gives a really good overview of the situation whilst also referencing specific music theory and historical evidence:
Maybe we should just make copyright non-transferable. As Sheeran says, songwriters know how few notes and chords are possible, it's always non-artists that are bringing these lawsuits.
As much as he dislikes fighting these cases he is entirely dependent on the money he makes from selling songs and the the way the fact that these have value/are copyrighted allows companies to market him and make him more famous.
This article seems like Techdirt is trying to exploit the well-known Ed Sheeran copyright case to push their own agenda.
Notably Sheeran didn't say anything against copyright - just that this particular claim shouldn't have come to court.
I think most musicians would agree with that, but it's hard to lay that on copyright law exactly - at most it would be a tweak to make it harder to bring action for "sound-alike" songs.
Interestingly any change like that would probably make it harder for artists to bring action against AI-written works that sound like theirs.
We honestly need to rethink intellectual property from top to bottom, it’s not just copyright and not just music, it’s so much more and it affects every single kind of IP:
Patent trolls, overly broad and vague patents that stifle innovation and prevent competition. Amazon should never have got a patent on 1-Click purchases and hardware shouldn’t be impossible to enter due to entrenched players’ deep patent portfolios.
Overextending trademark, look up all the ways Monster Beverages tries to abuse their “Monster” trademark, just as one example.
Copyright is used to stifle innovation in the arts as seen here. It keeps works out of the public domain for way too long as well.
Not only do these directly cause harm but they create chilling effects due to how they let the legal system be weaponized in their defense. Even if I would win a lawsuit regarding whether I’m allowed to do something, I might still let a big player bully me out of it because of the risk and asymmetric cost of going to court. This generates a huge amount of friction.
Without our current IP system you would not have all these abusive middle men in publishing, music, or other media. Not only are they stifling new art, they’re benefitting from IP by using it take a huge cut directly from artists per their contracts.
Trade secrets, allowing for reverse engineering but not direct espionage, are IMO the only kind of IP that we should allow as-is. Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.
Copy Right : Automatic, limit to 20 years. For more than 20 years each YEAR a tax of 2^(years of copyright, starting at 21) dollars PLUS 2^(Cyears - 20)% sales. Thus for year 21 this would be ~2million + 2% of sales. Year 25 would be ~33.5 million + 32% of sales. Year 26 would be 64% of sales, and year 27+ would be pointless.
Trade Mark : Unlimited number of years, BUT, must be filed every year. Some sort of small filing fee per mark (more costly than the government processing, this is also to protect name-space pollution) plus 1% (* edit: n%) of sales on any TMed product.
EDIT: * The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.
Character and Likeness things would all file under the consumer protection of Trade Mark.
Patents do not exist anymore, in the modern age no patent describes the 'useful art' in a way that is useful to anyone practicing that art in the scientific / applied engineering fields who should benefit from it, so it is unconstitutional by definition.
Discuss and adjust the copyright duration and post-free copyright numbers according to real incentive (IMO even 20 years is too long and should be ramped down to more like a decade, but the 'back end' of exponential fee increase should be stretched out to around 30 years total). Ah also, REGISTRATION of the copyright should lead to triple (actual) damages for infringement. Registration would also include filing with the National Library and an association of libraries, an archive copy of the work with is unencumbered by copyright and free of any 'DRM' or other 'protection mechanisms'; to be 'unsealed' after it becomes public domain.
I like this idea. If companies want to own the commons they should pay a tax to us as compensation. The current system is one of unlimited freeloading, we give away our commons for free and Big Mouse makes the $$$.
Yes. We’re getting royally ripped off. This is where you need to start the thought train to get people to see that fundamental change is needed. Everything else is downstream from the fact that people don't understand they’re giving away ownership of common property to others for free. It’s absurd.
I like your copyright idea in general even if I think maybe the formula could be tuned a bit. And I agree with your reasoning about patents although I don’t know enough about other industries to know if something patent-like may still be necessary (for example, as much as we hate big pharma for charging huge amounts on patented medicine, they probably do need a guaranteed payoff to incentivize the massive cost and risk of going through FDA trials).
I don’t think trademarks need to be taxed like that, basically every single consumer product has a trademark and I’m positive you could work around the nested trademark thing. I think trademarks are good to disincentivize fraud or misleading consumers (you shouldn’t be able to infringe <highly trusted brand> with low quality crap), the problem is the legal system allows frivolous application of trademark, like one company suing another for using the same common word (eg Monster) in a tangentially related domain, or another company trying to enforce trademark of something that shouldn’t even be in scope of trademark, like a color.
Especially for trademark I think we need to prevent its weaponization for anticompetitive/extractive purposes, more than we need to restrict or disincentivize its legitimate use. That probably requires some really clever lawyers with expertise moreso than HN comments
* Corporations / Individuals, should pay more _per mark_ when they file for more marks. Again, I don't even have a good idea of an initial proposal for the fee, just a good reason for wanting that. The more brands, characters (names attached to types of likenesses) and products locked up the less space there is for competition and innovation. Also, again, this isn't supposed to start out as a huge cost, it should be reasonable for an individual to have a trademark or two on something they're trying to create as a brand. Maybe smaller groups (including of 1 / individual) could have a lower registration fee on their first N terms. However this also needs to be balanced against effects we currently see with patent trolls. Human review (with a HIGH bar for pass!) and a requirement for a real product that consumers can purchase should be hard requirements.
* The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.
I just think you’re misunderstanding the problem, it’s not that trademarks are polluting the space of available terms - it’d be ridiculously punitive to tax McDonalds billions to trademark the Big Mac, Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar - it’s that a single trademark like “Monster Energy” can be abused well outside the domain it should apply within. And also that trademarks are being granted/enforced in domains they shouldn’t, like in colors or fonts.
The way trademarks are supposed to work is that your “Monster Energy” trademark applies within the domain, so you can block “Super Monster Soda” but have no case against “Fetish Monsters Diaper Playpack”. Similarly I think it’s fair that a big concrete, skinny clown holding a hamburger at a burger shop (with a big yellow capital M sign, selling Big Macs and McFlurries) across the street from an actual McDonalds would be penalized as trademark infringement without McDonald’s having to pay billions a year in trademark costs.
How about making it impossible to trademark common words (words that appear in lowercase in a dictionary)? Maybe it would incentivize companies to come up with more creative names.
You're listing all the problems (which everyone will readily agree) but what is the solution?
> Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.
You actually state almost the exact problem that's makes IP law so impossible to do at scale. Like it's easy to distinguish between similar content, extending content vs ripping content.
Pure ripping is easy, but step outside of that, when is it "similar vs ripping". When is it right to use a DCMA takedown? Is it because a song had a similar 4 note progression? is it 5 notes? is it "tonality" of those notes", the "interval", what makes it "recognizable"?
When is a patent the same as another? When is it different? Look at fasteners. There's an insane amount of patents for fasteners. Some are truly novel for very specific purposes I say it's a special fastener for vibrations in microgravity. Space fastener! Great, that's unique! Oh and it also works well in 1G. hrm.....
Once a patent is issued, how do you know who it belongs to? The person who made it, cool that's great. But let's say he doesn't have the ability to manufacture, so he sells the patent. Now you've got your proper buyers vs trolls.
It's easy to say "let's get rid of it!" and not consider the depth of the problem at hand.
All I know is that this system leads to many undesirable outcomes and at least in some domains I’m familiar with, like software patents, I can think of improvements (don’t grant software patents, just enforce trade secrets).
This is kind of a personal hill I’m willing to die on because I’m pissed enough already that I was born into a world that only just recently - last 200y - either enclosed (land) or ruined (air, ocean) all the other commons in a way that benefits winners (and their descendants) while harming me. But I think that, fundamentally, securitizing creative work is an enclosure of the “commons” that benefits the securitizers a bit much at the expense of the commons, indeed it’s one of the last commons we have left where there’s enough space for the Average Joe but even that is at risk given increasingly strong IP protection and multinational corporations’ patent portfolios.
For one, things like chord progressions in music are of low enough dimensionality that they can easily be fully “enclosed” to clear harm to the public, as their being previously used or invented doesn’t mean derivative-seeming works are actually stealing the IP. For patents, we’re also “enclosing” common sense applications of new technology to domains because our patent office and legal system don’t know any better, and are even setup to facilitate this (see that Texas county that handles a huge portion of patent disputes).
I don’t know all the ways to fix it, I’d rely on the expertise of lawyers and specialists (like people in the EFF) to figure that out. I’m sure people have problems with things I have domain knowledge about despite not knowing exactly how to fix it; that doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate problems. But just like when people take issue with my bigtech stuff, there are a huge number of incumbent entrenched interests incentivized to fight against detrimental (to them) changes, and most experts knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and solutions are actively employed/benefitting from the current system setup. It’s just a hard problem.
I disapprove of the term "IP". In the cases of both copyright and patent, there is no property; there is just a limited right to exploit a work or invention for a finite amount of time. That's not "property".
Patents is a mess. You invent cool thing X, and patent it; you get 15 years or so of protection. After 14 years, you tweak invention X to make thing Y, and patent that.
Wait - that means you've got another 15 years added to the patent term of X! How does that work? You should only have protection for the Y tweak.
Copyright was supposed to protect "works", not fragments of melody. The Led Zeppelin/Spirit argument about Taurus/Stairway To Heaven is interesting; I'm a big Spirit fan, and the Stairway intro sure sounds a lot like Taurus to me. I believe it was a lift. But there's a lot more to Stairway than the intro; Taurus was on Spirit's rather obscure first album, and it wasn't a big hit. It wasn't hit material. The claim was obviously a money-grab by the heirs of Randy California's estate against one of the biggest rock hits of the 70s. Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
This gets really murky when people start trading in copyrights and patents. I don't know why that's permitted; the rights should adhere strictly to the author/inventor. There should be no corporate copyright. I think the theory is that the author/inventor is often unable for financial reasons to defend their rights; but I don't see why that should be. If a claim has merit, it should be possible to find a practitioner who's willing to help you, in exchange for a share of the damages.
As a musician, to me the fact that Stairway's high note goes up while the low note goes down, is so substantial a change that it's not even slightly Taurus anymore, even looking just at the intro.
> Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
That'd create some strange incentives though – if it looks like the author might be dying (relatively) soon, people might opt to wait for a possibly premature expiration (both the author's and his/her copyrights) instead of paying to get access right now. In a particularly dystopic future, it might even create incentives to speed up an unfortunate author's demise just to get at the copyrights.
I may be misunderstanding, but I was thinking the commenter meant "ripping" as in ripping a DVD, as opposed to "ripping off of." So "immediately ripped and given away for free" meaning someone shouldn't be able to immediately distribute the recording outside of Netflix.
As in, that's easy to distinguish. But, take a single step away from image-for-image or byte-for-byte copy and it gets hard real fast.
That's where all the problem lies, right? That when is something not-a-direct-copy but still infringes-on-the-original?
And that's what I'm trying to highlight. My "space fastener" from earlier is unique because it does novel things (for arguments sake). But once I add "it works in 1G" well it's going up against a whole bunch of other nuts/bolts.
I'm hoping to help convince you that it's more than surface deep - is all.
I agree it’s not black and white. I think trademarks are important to protect consumers and legitimate businesses of all sizes - if Bob’s Burger’s builds up a reputation in Fooville, someone shouldn’t be able to completely copy their name+menu+corporate facade and open a shop right across the street. I also think that expensive fda trials need to be incentivized by a temporary monopoly (or some other payout) at the end, and you shouldn’t be able to inject some noise to be able to claim your rip of a just-released, expensive to produce show is something else. So the 3 forms of IP I take issue with all have legitimate applications in my eyes, and it’s ultimately going to require inherently flawed human judgment to tell when they’re infringed.
That said, I can easily point to bad outcomes that need to be handled better (mostly related to abusing litigation of IP), and I also think we can do better than the current pattern of securitizing the commons with low payment back to the commons. We’re incentivizing much more than what we’re actually attempting to incentivize with our IP system.
> I think trademarks are important to protect consumers
I agree. But did you see that the loser in the Wagatha Christie lawsuit has now trademarked the term "Wagatha Christie", even though she didn't coin the phrase?
You get a trademark to prevent "passing off" - other people making a product like yours, and using your marque to deceive consumers. When you register a trademark, you specify what classes of products you are asking protection for. Have a look at the list of goods and services Vardy claims protection for:
if you propose any reforms to the intellectual property schemes at all, musicians will be the first to be protesting that.
the system allows all kinds of abuse, but it also greatly benefits anybody who makes their living through intellectual property, at the expense of all the rest of us. this specific time it hurts Ed Sheeran, but it's also made him a lot of money. and we all care about it this time because it affects somebody famous enough for us to care, but all those "chilling effects" already exist and art and creativity is stifled every day to protect the rich and famous (and their heirs)
1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before? You can say the same for a paperclip and I'm sure there are countless more. I'm open to patents that seem obvious. Sometimes
novel and obvious ideas are there but it takes a special spark to get them defined and known. I will take 100 useless and obvious ideas, if it means we get 1 useful never seen one that helps us. By the way, "obvious" is only seen after it is presented. Think about it in these terms. There are math problems that seem impossible to solve yet once the answer is presented one wonders why they did not come up with the answer since the answer seems so obvious.
Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves.
The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.
> 1-Click may seem obvious. But then why did no one come up with it before?
There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.
1-click was patented in the days of forms, session tokens, ajax, etc. being relatively new. So yes someone was going to be first.
Someone was absolutely going to figure out the implementation of 1-click ordering regardless of who patented it. That’s why software patents suck, they almost always take the form of “apply technology X to domain Y in a really basic way” which would be invented hundreds of times independently even with no prior art - but whoever gets that patent gets to block or tax all those other independent inventions of the same pattern for years. I can’t speak as much to other industries but I’m confident it describes many many patents outside software. It’s not obvious in hindsight dude, it’s obvious that given a website where I’m buying things, a good UX for some cases is to just let me buy the thing in one click.
Hey I have a bunch of ideas for LLMs, should I get a patent for “a system for using a transformer model to find a message in a system’s logs” or “use a transformer model to identify a problem in an application” or “use a transformer model to produce output in the style of some human generated input”? Those are obvious given the invention of transformers, but software patents often take that exact structure “payment over a network” “use of a biometric signal to authenticate a banking transaction”.
I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to implement what you’re patenting to get the patent, just describe it well enough and hope nobody else implemented it or filed for it first. Which just incentivizes purely unproductive behavior of patenting “ideas” you expect will be independently arrived at many times in the near future so you can tax them. Or makes a market for so-called “inventors” to engage in this inefficient behavior so they can sell their “inventions” (accepted patents) to trolls or megacorps to do that (yes, this is what the people who file patents to tax others for a living call themselves).
Because we all thought it was stupid (keeping track of credit cards and other issues). There wasn't anything novel about one click.
My personal opinion is, copyright needs to be shortened. Patents harder to get. Trademarks are mostly fine.
What makes you think some other new system will be less abusable? Any new system will be dropped in among a lot of people who made their livings from abuse and will be very eager to keep doing so.
The whole "X is bad, so let's reinvent it from scratch" doesn't have a great track record. An obvious example is the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable. And as Mike Masnick pointed out, we see it over and over in the social media space. [1] Or we might look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Obviously, we should look at the way the current IP system is being misused or is suboptimal and improve it. But trying to rebuild it from scratch could end up worse even if every current bad actor wouldn't be vigorously lobbying to make abuse easier in the new version. And they certainly would.
I don’t see a way to iterate out of the current IP system because it benefits incumbents too much. It’s like with switching from property taxes to (Georgist) land value taxes or even ending NIMBY-ism, the people it benefits are the ones with the least power, and more importantly the exact people it’s stifling don’t even know it’s stifling them (who knows which entrepreneurs will benefit from relaxing the rules, and how exactly that will benefit consumers?). Especially in our current political system where money = the size of your political voice, there’s a lot of power that would oppose it. Securitizing part of the commons creates clear winners who’ll defend their assets, but returning those assets to the commons basically destroys an asset in a way with harder to understand benefits.
Also, the current IP system is in a way a form of protectionism that benefits mostly Western companies (at the expense of mostly western consumers). Piecemeal iteration towards allowing more profits to be captured by developing countries vs American companies… you’d need to make a bigger change that clearly benefits western consumers more than it harms them.
I’m not saying we need a communist revolution lol, but I do think we need to start by reasoning from the fundamental outcomes we want to incentivize and consider how a replacement system incentivizes those vs undesirable outcomes. For example, I think approximately no author (yes I know this applies to a couple of Tolkien’s pieces) is factoring in whether their IP lasts 25 years vs 75 years into their decision to write something. And I think it’s safe to say that patents, in at least most domains I’m familiar with, do much more to stifle actual entrepreneurship than to incentivize it.
For starters we can learn from the failings of our current system - it does some things well, but clearly it incentivizes things we should not be incentivizing, and I argue it disincentivizes some of what it think it’s incentivizing (entrepreneurship). Second-mover advantage and all that.
Another potential reason a replacement would be less abusable is that, if the replacement does away with IP middlemen (patent trolls, record labels making huge profits off what are effectively payday loans to artists, conglomerates like Disney acquiring as much IP in some domains as they can) we could avoid the situation where extractive elements lobby for increasingly more extractive laws or policies or throw their weight around in a way to create unfair outcomes.
I’d like to add our current system is something we’ve progressively iterated towards through centuries of common law (originating from before the Industrial Revolution and even such radical concepts as “widespread literacy” or “less than 90% of people being farmers”). It has accumulated cruft and crap and comes from a time where creative work was proportionately a less important part of the economy, and is a product of centuries of influence from incumbents seeking regulatory capture. Just weakening those incumbents and giving them less of a snowball to roll down the hill would lessen abuse for the time being.
Sorry, but as I said, those people will still exist on day 1 of the new regime. And they'll be lobbying hard between now and day 1. It's at least as plausible to me that starting fresh will be more abuseable, because you're going from a situation with lots of data on abuse modes to one with no data. It's a bet that you (or somebody) is going to be smarter than the real world, which is a bet that rarely works out.
It would be if we make it explicit that there is no right to profit from creativity - the sole purpose of the system should be to maximize the total creative output for the benefit of the commons.
Well, that article also wasn't very good. The condescending attitude towards anyone who isn't an engineer is palatable, even to an engineer like me. The discussion on Reddit is mostly constructive in spite of this.
The suggestion that HN is somehow representative of "engineers" in general is just not true. While HN includes many people with all sorts of opinions, the average is quite biased, especially on topics like this.
What a bunch of condescending assholes in that thread! They don’t respect us at all. Fortunately the engineers control the RLHF of their replacement :)
We spent the Trump years strongarming the rest of the world into uniform copyright laws. What happens now? “JK guys actually you can forget about what we said”. It seems that the only real option is to maintain copyright laws for all other countries while shortening your own. It seems like a huge competitive disadvantage for a country to be the first to do that.
Trump wasn't particularly special for this. In fact, by tanking TPP, he actually stopped at least one massive tool for curtailing IP sovereignty.
Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things.
That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.
>Powerful artists have access to legal resources that allow them to, intentionally or unintentionally, take from smaller artists without facing similar repercussions.
This is legal in general.
If I got into a legal battle with Disney or Nintendo it would go like this:
>You are probably going to lose
>If you do lose, you will be ruined
>If you don't lose, you will also be ruined
I don't have a solution except to avoid any ambiguity and let the big corporations sort that out among each other.
I honestly think the industry doesn't care, as long as the money flows. Like a lot of creative "jobs", there are 2 types of people who do them; those that can afford to and those that "have to" for whatever personal reasons.
The industry will continue to squeeze money out of both of them because the supply is essentially endless.
> “They are in a songwriters’ alphabet, our toolkit, and should be there for all of us to use. No one owns them or the way that they are played, in the same way that no one owns the color blue.”
Blue might be free, but the same is not true for all colors, at least not all paints [0].
As someone who prefers songs that use more than 7 notes and four chords, this kind of feels like a solution disguised as a problem.
The space Ed Sheeran and most popular music "explores" is small. But that problem is not inherent to making music people like. Even if he were writing in today's environment, Stevie Wonder would never have to worry about an accidental collision.
As a musician for over half my life, this statement is just strange to me:
>In the latest case, which just concluded last week, Sheeran said that if he lost he’d probably quit music altogether, as it’s just not worth it.
If you are able to "quit music", you aren't a musician. You're someone who figured out how to make sounds people like for money. It's just not something a musician can do.
This isn't about the philosophy behind what being a musician means..
He might not quit playing music as he's a musician, but he might quit the business, performing and putting out music for others to hear, if all that comes out of it is frivolous lawsuits.. Basically piranhas out for blood regardless of the harm they're causing.
If I had to spend half my time in court as a software engineer for using a for loop, it wouldn't make much sense for me to keep being one.
It was strange thing to say, even from a business point of view as given his position, he's well placed to make substantial income from live performance and streams regardless of the outcome.
I suppose it was hyperbole to illustrate the importance of the case.
I'm glad he won the case as it seems so frivolous to me, but I wouldn't object to him quitting music nonetheless.
> There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.
But I don’t really run into such coincidences regularly.
Maybe the difference is just that the artists that I listen to don’t have millions to be sued for.
Sheeran writes basic commercial pop music. Maybe if he tried learning some minor chords or scales and tried shifting tempos, he wouldn't get popped with so many copyright claims.
"There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available."
But yeah, let's feel bad for the millionaire mediocre musician.
What is destroying musicians is not copywright, but the oligarchy of distribution and lack of artist representation. For food for thought, look up what Ed makes on Spotify per play, vs what the average person would, and how much of that goes to the labels and distributors.
Limit the copyright to the commercial viability of the work. Get rid of all the intermediary performance rights bullshit. Don't allow copyright to be sold or transferred, only the original creator of the work can retain it and seek legal action if damaged.
Sheeran gets 75,665,830 monthly Spotify listeners based on recent Spotify data. Spotify pays artists about $0.003 per stream, which is $3 for one thousand monthly listeners. Using those numbers, you can estimate that Sheeran earns at least $226,997.49 monthly from Spotify streams alone
This calculation is done using that $0.003 number for Ed Sheeran.
Spotify spent a long time in negations to get that price, and I'm not aware of any credible claims they pay higher rates to popular artists (outside perhaps limited time launch promotions)
I think the more interesting question is how much Sheeran gets vs his record company, but that isn't a Spotify thing.
From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.
We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder.
For example: if Billie Eilish receives 2% of all Spotify streams in a month, she will receive 2% of that month’s available streaming royalties.
So the more streams you do, the higher your streamshare, the higher your average pay per steam.
Yes it annoys the hell out of me that I support so many underground bands and realise that 60% of my subscription fee is probably going to pop artists.
I think the point was my $0.003/play for me singing in the shower(^) vs. Sheeran's fraction of that after everyone else's cut.
But I don't really know what the point of that is - sure maybe now he could go on his own and take it all, and coast for a while with existing fan base, no marketing or major concerts, etc. - but he presumably (at least at the time he last locked in to x years) thinks that's value for money.
I'm not sure how Ed Sheeran distribute his music, but I think you're making a mistake in the calculations. Ed Sheeran doesn't make $226,997.49 per month from Spotify, that is the amount they pay the record company to stream his music.
Artist frequently complain that Spotify isn't paying them enough, but forgetting that the record companies take a very large chuck of the profits, just to act as an increasingly irrelevant middleman.
Yes, and almost no radio stations program indie artists, so they make pretty much zero from radio. They make a little from streaming, but mostly make money from live gigs and fan merchandise.
Yes, but that's not necessarily a good thing when it comes to flamebait. Succinct flamebait often has the most trollish effects, whether you intended it to or not.
I wasn't try to flamebait, it is my sincere believe that the whole concept of copyright is greed, just like avoiding regulations, cutting corners in safety etc are examples of greed (all in my humble opinion).
Any argument towards my conclusion on copyright would be entirely philosophical but I see your point about trolling is effect not intent but I disagree with it it only stifles discussion and promotes echochamberism (in my humble opinion).
Well, they lobbied for this crap now they're suffering the consequences of it
Sure, some IP protection I'd argue is needed, but they're always on the maximization side of it and they're unhappy it's being used against them? Oh well
I find it so disingenuous when people claim "oh well there's only so many notes". Sure, the basic building blocks are the same, but that's like saying every computer chip is the same because they're all made of transistors. It's not about the building blocks, there's an infinite number of ways that you can put them together, and not just by random chance either. Dave Grohl will happily tell you he stole his drum beats from Disco, you would have to be an idiot to claim that Nirvana produced disco music.
The complaints about copyright law are to me atleast, not seeing the forest for the trees. It's much more concerning the conflicts of interest between the music labels and spotify - setting up a deal that essentially siphons off their artists's profits to themselves, than copyright law as it is today. If the market were structured such that the labels had a fiduciary responsibility to their signed artists this market would look very different.
> But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part:
>
> There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.
Too many technical artisans (and I'm using this term loosely, to include those who craft software, music, or any other physical / virtual good that requires some modicum of skill to produce) believe that the law regarding copyright applies to the sole right to sell a particular arrangement of whatever medium it is they are working in. This is the wrong thinking.
While it is true western music has twelve notes and some finite number of common chords, which can only be arranged in finite time in finite ways, this is irrelevant to copyright, because notes, like source code, like paint, like lyrics, etc also has Color, and if you don't understand what Color is (and think it's red, green and blue, and such), then I suggest you read https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
I'm not sure I understand you, but changing, for example, the timbre of a sequence of notes won't let you get around a copyright claim. The courts have on ocasion broadly interpreted it as the sequence and timing of notes in the US.
What matters for copyright is not the notes but how the notes got there. Colour refers to the qualitative differences in provenance, not timbre or anything physical. That's what the article is about. Every thing, from the legal perspective, is imbued with these unseen attributes. It's very confusing for artisans of any kind
That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats... [2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...