Marvin Gaye fam wins suit against Blurred Lines writers, precedent bans all music

All music has "inspiration" from prior material, so I'm not sure to what extent that will happen?
 
Owen Glyndwr said:
Speed it up. Slow it down. Alter the key a bit. Change the instrumentation. Add other layers on top. How is this any different from sampling?
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Sampling vastly accelerated the process.

Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery. Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)

Blues muscians like Bonnie Raitt went to study and learn from Muddy Waters. Of course then she emulates some of his work. That's a far cry from directly lifting someone playing a tune or singing a song, and then placing it within the body of your new work. If it's collaboration, then that's one thing, or it's the unusual like Natalie Cole singing with the sampling of her deceased father in Unforgetable, then it's eeriely beautiful.

Link to video.

That's a big difference from the sampling controversy with 2 Live Crew.
See As Clean As They Wanna Be vs Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman.

Link to video.

Maybe musing upon this would be ultimately prescriptive. Musicians have a very miniscule chance of creating one hit song. When they do, being probably unknown, then the chances of them making any real money from it is absymal (agent costs, studio costs, distribution costs, etc).

But some do make enough impact that their first album makes money. In the end they lose control over their music in order to get that money. During the 80's Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney got in bidding wars to buy up the copyrights on lots of music, and hence you had very irritated musicians hearing their songs to sell products that they disliked or even hated.

The musican always loses out over these kinds of issues. The studios traditionally made a fortune, but post-Napster and the preonderance of outright stealing of music, then evolves to any song being on youtube for anyone to listen to, and even convert the flv files, and store them on their hard drives.

Our legal system hasn't caught up to the rapid rise of electronics and computer technology, and instead of emulation by flattery, or collaboration, some musicians simply shoplifted bits of songs.

What comes around goes around, for the very ones who do this, will likely have it done to them. Sadly, the ones who do it, make far more money by doing it, so they don't care. It pays to be a thief instead of honoring the original contribution.

How hard would it be to work with families of decreased musicians, or work in collaboration with living ones, in order to promote their earlier contributions as well as make a name for yourself?
 
Angst said:
All music has "inspiration" from prior material, so I'm not sure to what extent that will happen?
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Mere inspiration is insufficient. Briefly, you need to show substantial similarity to demonstrate infringement.
 
http://time.com/3744102/robin-thicke-pharrell-blurred-lines-verdict-appeal/
Music experts may think the ruling was outrageous, but a precedent set by the tech industry may mean it sticks.

Count me among those who were infuriated by Tuesday’s “Blurred Lines” verdict. “Outrageous, indefensible” and “an assault upon the livelihoods of all creative people, everywhere” is how I immoderately put it in the British music mag NME.
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As Bill Guerin, a friend from my days at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, wrote Thursday on his Facebook wall (where the debate is ongoing), “If highly trained musicians are arguing about whether it’s infringement, it’s not infringement.”

But of course, it was not a group of highly trained musicians who determined that Robin Thicke’s 2013 hit, composed by Pharrell, stole from Marvin Gaye’s 1977 hit “Got to Give it Up” — It was a jury of eight people who surely were not Pharrell’s musical peers.

“[T]he judge overseeing the case should never have let the case go before a jury,” Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu wrote in The New Yorker. “The ruling against Thicke was a mistake, and it should, and likely will, be reversed on appeal.”

Indeed, as I and many other musicians have pointed out, the songs in question share virtually no concrete musical material — no consecutive run of notes in the melody or any similar content that has been the basis for successful copyright claims in comparable cases. Testimony to the contrary made in court by the Gaye family’s musicologist, Judith Finell, descended into the absurd.

Still, I’m struck by how many laypeople seem fine with the verdict, pointing out that the two songs do “feel” more alike than songs written in the same style usually do, regardless of what we in the musical priesthood say. Legally, there may be something to that.

If the Gaye estate’s lawyers find themselves on the ropes during the appeal process, they might think about importing a concept from a different realm of copyright law known as “look and feel,” New York entertainment lawyer Marc Jacobson told me. (He is not involved in this case, but his firm specializes in music and film.)

“Look and feel” comes from the world of software company litigation. If I sell a piece of software that looks and feels a lot like Apple’s operating system, I may be infringing on their copyright, even if my OS doesn’t share a single common line of code with Apple’s (a scenario that is not merely hypothetical).

“To the extent that there is a ‘sound and feel’ concept that may emerge in the music industry, this case may be the one [to set that precedent],” Jacobson says.

If the software analogy holds, the notes and rhythms in a song are the code, but the overall effect — say, a winning combination of sultry falsetto, bouncy staccato electric piano, and glass bottle percussion — is the legally protected look and feel.

This is not an argument that is likely to fly with musicians. Half of the time when we sit down to compose, we think, “Boy, I wish I could write something like [insert copyrighted title here].” We are constantly peering, groping in each other’s “look and feel,” trying to find our own way of recreating the magic.

Even the percussionist who played those glass bottles on “Got to Give it Up,” legendary Motown Funk Brother Jack Ashford, doesn’t buy it. “I don’t think you can copyright a groove,” he told WREG-TV in Memphis back in 2013. “I wouldn’t call it a rip-off.”

Jacobson’s argument is further complicated by the fact that the Gaye estate doesn’t own the “Got to Give it Up” record, only the abstract composition. To what extent does the song’s “look and feel” derive from the notes on the page, versus the intangibles captured in the studio? How does one really disaggregate the two?

At this point, it might not matter, Jacobson said.

“The appellate courts and the judges give great deference to juries in what they hear,” he said. “So if the average, reasonable man or woman says that those two works are substantially similar, it’s very hard for an appellate court to take a different point of view.”

“Average” people. Not musicians.
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A good point that has been raised in an article I read is that the similarities in this case are only so - similarities, even if they are plentiful. If we followed the logic of this trial, 30+ years of reggae music would be the property of Bob Marley.

Demonstrating the similarities of the songs is easy, do basic musicological analysis with a mixture of understanding texture, then there are several stylistic areas the two overlap, but that is simply because of the musicologist's expertise in genre classification and the basic ability to analyze components and see similarities; not because the two songs are the same. It's not even the same rhythm, it's a somewhat similar texture and similar rhythmic feel but if deconstructed the two pieces are very very different.

Traditionally similarity has been found within the pop song's top liner, or sometimes the bassline (if complex enough), but this is copyrighting a style or a genre. It shouldn't be done this way; musical creativity is already suffering from copyright as is.

I'm relieved from illram saying this will probably not be precedent in the future. I hope so. Historically music has changed a lot in the last hundred years or so, with the conceptualization of IP being more warped decade by decade.

Like, think of the way jazz functions, as a genre. Should the jazz standard's melody (the equivalent of the pop industry's top liner) be IP? That would undermine the functionality of the entire tradition.

People should be reminded that even the tradition of composition (where a composer is elevated to status of genius through his handicraft, being a premise of our understanding of IP) is relatively new, and even beginning to be outdated at this point. If one went through historical deconstruction of how composition used to work, it used to be completely different. Eg Bach, a canonical "genius" had a completely different conceptualization of how composition worked, ie who was the owner of a piece; a piece by Bach was changed by him several times during his life, as such a musical piece was more a fleeting concept and was differing in time, much unlike our conceptualization of recorded sound - which are incidentally not rock solid items either, as the live playing of a piece often differs from the recording. And people used to borrow these "fleeting" pieces from each other, all the time, ownership of sound was way different before the recording industry.

This should not take historical precedent. The only people who would win from it would be the IP holders. Not the musicians, not the studio people, not the consumers.

EDIT: thanks for the article C_H.
 
Sure, American country music and bluegrass got much of their tunes from Scotland, for Scots relocated to America in the very first immigration wave. Does all County Music then belong to those Scots? And some of it came from Irish immigrants who came far later due to the Potato Famine.

But then, who did the Scots and Irish borrow it from?

While many poor white immigrants in the wide section of the Appalachian Mountains had no slaves, they were around slaves, and so diverse African cultures influenced their music.

Because some of those slaves were brought to places like Ghana from elsewhere, and displaced later to Haiti, then how in the world would you ever decide where the music came from and who should be paid?
 
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