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Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits
- bitwize 7y agoThis is the exact scenario black musicians have been agitating for for decades. Funk and R&B artists in particular have found themselves frustrated that their grooves -- the bits that actually make the song -- can be lifted wholesale by other artists because historically copyright law only concerned itself with melody. The Blurred Lines ruling makes it clear that grooves are, in fact, copyrightable. Maybe we'll see the benefits as musicians are forced to innovate.
- zozbot234 7y agoThe Blurred Lines case was not about rhythmic grooves, it was basically about instrumentation/orchestration and to a lesser extent about basic harmonic elements. There are very good reasons to enable "lifting" of these things, namely because they're basically functional elements - there's only so many instrumentation choices you can make in any given song, and often it's even forced by e.g. your genre choice (rock'n'roll, jazz, funk, R&B, what have you). If you want genres to evolve freely, that's not going to happen if everyone who writes in a genre has to pay copyright to whoever happened to be first in experimenting with that one weird choice in instrumentation.
- bediger4000 7y agoThis would seem to be making the case that copyright is not serving its explicit purpose: to increase the size of the public domain. That public domain's value is even acknowledged in the article: there's no "virgin birth" for music or some such pithy aphorism.
- simonblack 7y agoUnintended consequences of excessively long copyright periods. Couldn't happen to a nicer industry.