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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
by 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 agoSo 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 agoJudges 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 agoDepends 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 agoAnd 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 agoThe 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.