9 ms·

That sounds reasonable but how do you define “any form of creativity/expression” legally? That’s the problem. If you know anything about writing music you shou

by ebbv 9y ago

That sounds reasonable but how do you define “any form of creativity/expression” legally? That’s the problem. If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format. Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply. The problem with limiting protection to only a few years is that would ensure an even more brutal cycle of song “remakes” for all pop music which would be even more stale than what we have now.

tarsinge 9y ago
> Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply Not quite true for pop melodies especially on basic progressions when you apply all the contraints (harmony related to the current chord, tension/release). Lyrics on the other hand...
- ebbv 9y ago
  People are pretty flexible in what they’ll accept in a melody. You can play a lot with outside notes and weird rhythms if you have a good performance and as long as you bring it back to diatonic notes.
kijin 9y ago
The market can decide whether or not it wants all those stale remakes, whether with or without legal protection.
- hashkb 9y ago
  That's the problem. The market likes repetitive crap. Artists need to be forced by the courts to be creative. Apparently.
cJ0th 9y ago
I'd say “any form of creativity/expression” means you take something and don't copy it 1:1. Copying 100% of a (lyric|composition|: not okay, taking a subset of it: fine. Admittedly, it has to be a bit more sophisticated than that. For instance, getting away with just omitting the very last word would be ridiculous. > If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format. yes and no. A chord can be played in many ways. For instance, when you play C major you could play the root an octave below the third and the fifth or one octave up. This alone is no worth copyright. But when the way every single chord of a progression is played is copied it gets questionable, imo. Even more so when you look at "jazzy" chords where you can sprinkle some "non necessary" notes in here and there for color. > The problem with limiting protection to only a few years is that would ensure an even more brutal cycle of song “remakes” for all pop music which would be even more stale than what we have now. You could be right, but personally I am not convinced.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  So let’s say I don’t copy 100%... but I asymptotically approach it. At what decimal do I infringe, or as long as I never reach unity am I cool?
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    Judges are humans not computers. The downside is, some sentences are incredibly unfair. The upside is, it works pretty well most of the time. Just look at the Fair Use doctrine. It seems to work reasonably well for literature. Why can't it apply to music? In particular this: > The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. If a song has 500 words then wouldn't you say copying 20 is fair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
    - hashkb 9y ago
      Depends which 20. "I knew she was gonna meet her connection" maybe... "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need" def not ok.
      - cJ0th 9y ago
        And why is it no okay? (Apart from that it is 21 words not 20 but I did not mean to imply it has to be exactly 20. There is room for human common sense and yes, it is not perfect and sometimes unjust.)
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  The problem I see with your analysis is that you're taking a fundamentally creative and subjective process, reducing it to its output, and then making comparisons based solely on the mathematics of the output. That strikes me as akin to comparing two paintings by counting pairs of brush strokes. The reality is much more complex than that. We have really powerful computers and we know a lot of math, so it's understandably seductive to reduce a problem like this to one that yields to mathematical analysis, but there is something important lost in the reduction. It's a song we're discussing, and not just a progression of chords.
wyager 9y ago
Preventing stale remakes probably shouldn’t be a function of copyright law.
hashkb 9y ago
You said "there's not many chord progressions to be found inside [a chord progression]". Pop music is free to get more complicated, using reharmonization, voice leading, instrumentation and every other trick in the "real music" book and stop 1/4/5ing us so hard. We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault. Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault. Why is it a fault? Music is about what people love. Why should they stretch that to love something else? Because some consider it more "serious"? >Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented. It tends to have the problem of very few caring about it -- and that audience is tiny (as seen in streaming rates, sales, etc) compared to other forms of music.
  - was8309 9y ago
    how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing? It once wasn't a stretch at all for people to 'hear', love, and make a hit of a harmonically complicated song like Ray Charles' version of 'Come Rain or Come Shine', but now we seem incapable of doing so. Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down?
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing? People liked simple melodies and harmonies for several millennia before the advent of a music industry and/or music marketing, so? >It once wasn't a stretch at all for people to 'hear', love, and make a hit of a harmonically complicated song like Ray Charles' version of 'Come Rain or Come Shine', but now we seem incapable of doing so. They might have gone to that, but not to Ornette Coleman or Schoenberg or Berg. >Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down? I'd say, it's complicated. Basically, it's not the people's tastes in music that have been dumbed down per se, but the role that music plays in people's lives that has been dumbed down with mass constant access and music as muzak. But while you mention Come Rain or Come Shine or some such, I don't see e.g. Louie Louie being that elaborate, or Tea for Two for that matter. Heck, most rock n' roll of the 50s is the same BS chords and similar melodic lines over again with sophomore lyrics. And yet in the 70s people listened to 12+ minute long "opuses" and solos (that while requiring technical dexterity, aesthetically and culturally they were as much a joke as Nicky Ninaj, complete with King Arthur references and trivial re-uses of classical harmonies and pointless soloing). So, it's complicated.

by ebbv 9y ago

tarsinge 9y ago

> Melodies and lyrics, on the other hand, there’s a nearly infinite supply Not quite true for pop melodies especially on basic progressions when you apply all the contraints (harmony related to the current chord, tension/release). Lyrics on the other hand...

ebbv 9y ago
People are pretty flexible in what they’ll accept in a melody. You can play a lot with outside notes and weird rhythms if you have a good performance and as long as you bring it back to diatonic notes.

kijin 9y ago

The market can decide whether or not it wants all those stale remakes, whether with or without legal protection.

hashkb 9y ago
That's the problem. The market likes repetitive crap. Artists need to be forced by the courts to be creative. Apparently.

cJ0th 9y ago

I'd say “any form of creativity/expression” means you take something and don't copy it 1:1. Copying 100% of a (lyric|composition|: not okay, taking a subset of it: fine. Admittedly, it has to be a bit more sophisticated than that. For instance, getting away with just omitting the very last word would be ridiculous. > If you know anything about writing music you should know why chord progressions can’t be copyrighted. There’s only 12 notes, there’s not that many unique chord progressions to be found in the Standard I/IV/V pop music format. yes and no. A chord can be played in many ways. For instance, when you play C major you could play the root an octave below the third and the fifth or one octave up. This alone is no worth copyright. But when the way every single chord of a progression is played is copied it gets questionable, imo. Even more so when you look at "jazzy" chords where you can sprinkle some "non necessary" notes in here and there for color. > The problem with limiting protection to only a few years is that would ensure an even more brutal cycle of song “remakes” for all pop music which would be even more stale than what we have now. You could be right, but personally I am not convinced.

QAPereo 9y ago
So let’s say I don’t copy 100%... but I asymptotically approach it. At what decimal do I infringe, or as long as I never reach unity am I cool?
- cJ0th 9y ago
  Judges are humans not computers. The downside is, some sentences are incredibly unfair. The upside is, it works pretty well most of the time. Just look at the Fair Use doctrine. It seems to work reasonably well for literature. Why can't it apply to music? In particular this: > The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair. If a song has 500 words then wouldn't you say copying 20 is fair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
  - hashkb 9y ago
    Depends which 20. "I knew she was gonna meet her connection" maybe... "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need" def not ok.
    - cJ0th 9y ago
      And why is it no okay? (Apart from that it is 21 words not 20 but I did not mean to imply it has to be exactly 20. There is room for human common sense and yes, it is not perfect and sometimes unjust.)
jschwartzi 9y ago
The problem I see with your analysis is that you're taking a fundamentally creative and subjective process, reducing it to its output, and then making comparisons based solely on the mathematics of the output. That strikes me as akin to comparing two paintings by counting pairs of brush strokes. The reality is much more complex than that. We have really powerful computers and we know a lot of math, so it's understandably seductive to reduce a problem like this to one that yields to mathematical analysis, but there is something important lost in the reduction. It's a song we're discussing, and not just a progression of chords.

wyager 9y ago

Preventing stale remakes probably shouldn’t be a function of copyright law.

hashkb 9y ago

You said "there's not many chord progressions to be found inside [a chord progression]". Pop music is free to get more complicated, using reharmonization, voice leading, instrumentation and every other trick in the "real music" book and stop 1/4/5ing us so hard. We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault. Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented.

coldtea 9y ago
>We (the audience) just love repetitive bullshit too much. It's our fault. Why is it a fault? Music is about what people love. Why should they stretch that to love something else? Because some consider it more "serious"? >Jazz, although built on a (less) restrictive harmonic foundation, tends to not have this problem, because the musicians and the audience are more talented. It tends to have the problem of very few caring about it -- and that audience is tiny (as seen in streaming rates, sales, etc) compared to other forms of music.
- was8309 9y ago
  how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing? It once wasn't a stretch at all for people to 'hear', love, and make a hit of a harmonically complicated song like Ray Charles' version of 'Come Rain or Come Shine', but now we seem incapable of doing so. Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down?
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >how much of what people currently 'love' is based on some natural meritocracy vs decades of big money marketing? People liked simple melodies and harmonies for several millennia before the advent of a music industry and/or music marketing, so? >It once wasn't a stretch at all for people to 'hear', love, and make a hit of a harmonically complicated song like Ray Charles' version of 'Come Rain or Come Shine', but now we seem incapable of doing so. They might have gone to that, but not to Ornette Coleman or Schoenberg or Berg. >Do you think there is no chance at all that audiences have been dumbed down? I'd say, it's complicated. Basically, it's not the people's tastes in music that have been dumbed down per se, but the role that music plays in people's lives that has been dumbed down with mass constant access and music as muzak. But while you mention Come Rain or Come Shine or some such, I don't see e.g. Louie Louie being that elaborate, or Tea for Two for that matter. Heck, most rock n' roll of the 50s is the same BS chords and similar melodic lines over again with sophomore lyrics. And yet in the 70s people listened to 12+ minute long "opuses" and solos (that while requiring technical dexterity, aesthetically and culturally they were as much a joke as Nicky Ninaj, complete with King Arthur references and trivial re-uses of classical harmonies and pointless soloing). So, it's complicated.