14 ms·

Ed Sheeran on creative cost of lawsuit: ‘Now I just film everything’

132 points by hhs 5y ago

frogperson 5y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword. You can't make a living off of a strong copyright system and not expect there to be zero downsides.
- stazz1 5y ago
  "Live by the blurry bureaucratic tornado, die by the BBT"
  - danuker 5y ago
    How Kafkaesque. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
- andybak 5y ago
  Yeah, I did think that a few successful court cases amounted to not much more than a bit of wealth redistribution. I'm hardly shedding tears for Mr Sheeran.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Karellen 5y ago
  Most recording artists don't make their living off of a strong copyright system. The RIAA(/MPAA) cartels - who are the ones behind the strong copyright system - ensure that they get the bulk of the proceeds from recordings, and their distribution, and the protections provided by the copyright system. A lot of this comes from having subsidiaries that allow for music industry equivalents of "Hollywood accounting" to funnel the bulk of profits away from the people who actually make the works. Artists mostly make money from live performances and direct merch sales, which don't depend all that much on copyright. There are maybe one or two unicorns (like Sheeran) who are so successful that they do make buckets of money - but they too serve the industry's ends. They can be pointed at to convince all the new artists trying to break into the biz that the contracts they're getting aren't really that bad, as they too could become the next Ed Sheeran if they try hard enough. The system we have is not one designed by the artists in the music industry.
- javert 5y ago
  That statement is just blatantly illogical. It's like saying, "if you cook using heat, you can expect to burn yourself sometimes." If you make a living under a strong copyright system, you should expect to be perfectly fine as long as you don't copy someone. Sure, there can be weird exceptions, and as in any complex system, we should adjust the system over time to account for them, rather than immediately throwing out the whole system. For example, when a plane crashes, we don't rush to abolish the FAA, or to ban aviation.
  - DiabloD3 5y ago
    Have you never burned yourself cooking? I'm confused at your counterexample.
    - javert 5y ago
      I haven't burned myself in any significant way (i.e. seriously), but apologies for an admittedly imperfect example. Here is a better example: "Live by cooking, expect to die by getting burned." That's the kind of argument OP is making and it's unsound.
skybrian 5y ago
Preserving musical history seems like a nice side effect? If they make a documentary, they'll have more footage.
- willnonya 5y ago
  Ed Sheeran is not the Beetles. That he's making this footage out of fear of litigation should bother you
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > That he's making this footage out of fear of litigation should bother you I don't see how it protects him at all from litigation. But why would that bother me. Scientists use dated journals with unremovable pages to achieve a similar effect. Why would it bother me that he wants to document his process as legal protection? > Ed Sheeran is not the Beetles. I don't know what you mean by "not the Beetles"? The latest documentaries were about Queen, Elton John, and I think the Ramones. There hasn't been a Beetles movie since when?
    - eatonphil 5y ago
      Peter Jackson just released a new Beatles documentary last year in Disney Plus. That's a major director covering a major band on a major streaming platform. It was big news. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/11/the-beatles-get-back-review-peter-jackson-disney-plus-documentary-1234681499/ https://www.indiewire.com/2021/11/the-beatles-get-back-revie...
    - mellosouls 5y ago
      There hasn't been a Beetles movie since when? Peter Jackson documentary last year! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles:_Get_Back https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles:_Get_Back Yesterday movie 2 years ago https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(2019_film) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(2019_film) We can't get rid of them - they're so infused in the culture you haven't even noticed!
  - skybrian 5y ago
daenz 5y ago
Apparently he was taken to court in March 2022 for a song that was released in 2017. Anyone else think this is very quick result from the justice system? Or did he have this hanging over his head for years before it actually went to court?
- jffry 5y ago
  Per Wikipedia [1], legal proceedings started in 2018, and the actual court hearing stage happened over the past month. It's not clear how much of that time was waiting for whatever reason, versus ongoing back-and-forth motions and such. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_You#Copyright_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_You#Copyright_trial
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Plus COVID killed the legal system for 2 years. I just went to court on a case yesterday and the judge brought up the docket and we realized the last time we filed anything was 2019.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Not sure if this is the final result. With tens of millions as the prospective payout, an appeal is always on the horizon
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    The parts in question also admittedly sound quite similar.
strogonoff 5y ago
Ed Sheeran’s filming of his creative process for legal purposes hints at a world where it doesn’t matter if you can improvise a great melody in the moment out of nothing—if they happen to overhear you playing it, any plagiarist with a camera can record a convincing sequence of iterations leading up to your brilliant riff and successfully sue you into oblivion. I wish for a world where musicians make music because they like it more so than to profit; a world where improvising on someone else’s musical idea is considered homage, not theft. (That said, I imagine many bands whose music I like were in fact inspired by fame and riches of rockstars before them.)
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  The problem as I see it, when you get that famous, you look like a piggy bank to some people. Say you were walking down the street and tripped over someones foot, most likely you apologize and move on. But if Ed was walking down the street and tripped over the wrong persons foot, that person would quickly turn it into "I'm suing", "you hurt my foot", "I will need therapy", "I think I need to go the hospital". Now none of those things may be true but they are all in service of one goal: "I just had an interaction with someone super famous and super rich, let me see how much I can extract from them for my own gain".
  - alan-hn 5y ago
    That's because the US (and many other 'westernized' locales) have this shitty ideology where the individual matters more than other individuals or the collective. It's why the US has so many scammers and fraudsters. Edit: this is from my perspective living in the US. I'm not saying that the US has more scammers than other places, just a ton due to this western ideology. My comment about the ideology includes places such as Europe and possibly even China now
    - smitty1e 5y ago
      Once one asserts that the plural precedes the singluar, fresh vistas of tyranny open to whoever is in control.
MarcoZavala 5y ago
bombcar 5y ago
At some point for professionals the cost of continual recording is relatively low. However; once you have a policy of doing it gaps in the recording could come back to bite you.
larodi 5y ago
This all only matters for people trying to ‘compose’ trivial melodies and make them into hits. Who are these people - everyone in pop industry. But only few, like Max Martin, know how to devise a simple, yet original melody… and perhaps there are only that many of these riffs.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  “Original” is a bit of a sham. There is a vanishingly small chance that any newly created work would actually be unique and new to the world. At the very least, all the usable chord progressions and listenable rhythms for pop have been discovered already.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  This is really an absurd oversimplification. Almost every great melody is "trivial". And almost no original melody is actually original.
treyfitty 5y ago
How does filming “song writing sessions” help here? A songwriter could be grocery shopping and hear a tune they like and copy it. I don’t understand how filming just sessions will protect anyone.
- mbreese 5y ago
  I think the key is the progression. If you see how a melody is formed, then it’s more likely to be organic. If you are just copying something, there is less of a progression as when you’re video recording, it’s already almost “done”.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    That doesn't answer the question. You could be out buying groceries, hear a good tune, and then pretend you invented it in steps when you get back to your studio. Just like we pretend we figured out the tortoise/hare algorithm for finding loops in linked lists at interviews.
  - jancsika 5y ago
    Maybe if you were a mid-19th Century German composer it worked something like that. But that's just not how most songwriting works. E.g., according to Mark Ronson: 1. Amy Winehouse casually spoke the following sentence in a conversation with Mark Ronson: "They tried to make me go to Rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'" 2. Mark Ronson said, "That could be a song." 3. They went to the studio where Amy Winehouse played a 12-bar blues chord progression on the guitar and sang those lyrics (using a simple pentatonic scale). 4. Mark suggested to speed it up and do a throwback Motown-era arrangement. 5. Done. Unless they recorded their entire conversation, all you'd get is Winehouse sitting down with a guitar and singing the entire hook of the song. If anything, anxiety-fueled "song formation" recordings will just cause songwriters to waste time going in the wrong direction. That is, they'll take their ready-to-go phrases or sub-phrases of music and sing fragments into the mic, in an order that seems as if they are constructing what they already have formed in their ear. Edit: clarification
- vasco 5y ago
  It discourages the ones suing because they'll be less sure they'll win.
curiousgal 5y ago
I mean there are only so many notes, the combination must have been all covered by now, right? So some overlap between songs is to be expected I assume.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I think that depends a lot on what your definition of "close" is. If you have notes and lengths, you can generate a fairly big space just from that. I'm no music expert but you could ask whether transposing the notes up and down the scale counts as a new "thing", along with any number of other ways of generating a new tune from an existing one.
- danuker 5y ago
  Every 8-note, 12-beat melody combo is in CC0: https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-copyright https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-cop...
danuker 5y ago
You can pick a CC0 melody from this list: > The goal: to copyright every single combo in order to give it to the public so musicians and artists can use melodies without worrying about copyright issues down the line. > The algorithm created by the two programmer-musicians can put together every single 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-copyright https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-cop...
- HWR_14 5y ago
  That's not going to hold up in court. They cannot claim a copyright to exhaustive computer generated corpus. Even if they could, it doesn't make sense. You don't get to ignore every books copyright just because you read a dictionary.
  - addsubtract 5y ago
    This isn’t reading the dictionary, it’s similar to generating new unique sentences and claiming copyright on that. Right?
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      It's creating 12 long sequences from 12 notes. That sounds far closer to a dictionary than anything else.
  - danuker 5y ago
    > They cannot claim a copyright to exhaustive computer generated corpus. And why not? For example, a UK law specifically mentions "computer-generated" work: > If the work is computer-generated, copyright expires fifty years after the work is made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents... Is there any law you based the word "cannot" on? Is there a limitation on the extent of such copyright claims a person can make? Even though physically one couldn't write it on paper during one's lifetime?
    - 5y ago
bufferoverflow 5y ago
I don't see how filming proves that you didn't steal a melody. You could've memorized it off camera and just pretended you invented it on the spot.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > I don't see how filming proves that you didn't steal a melody. What you think of as "proof" and what serves as "proof" in court are wildly different things, because court cases are largely decided on subjective merits. ie You aren't likely to be part of the jury, so hypothetical situations are simply that. I can imagine observing a live narrative that looks improvised and creative. At that point, I'm not sure what other material difference there needs to be for me. This kind of decision isn't a life-or-death situation, so the bar is lower than absolute certainty.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > court cases are largely decided on subjective merits Would add that civil cases are tried on a preponderance of evidence standard, not beyond reasonable doubt.
    - djur 5y ago
      Yes. Right now these cases are essentially coin flips -- will this specific judge think that these two songs sound similar enough that there's a >50% likelihood that the defendants had heard the plaintiff's work? Which is why in the long term the only solution for lawsuits like this is to change the law so that mere melodic/rhythmic similarity is not sufficient to file suit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throwthere 5y ago
  The best the video could do is support the defense around conscious intent. It’s not proof of that as you say because it could be a ruse (although a ruse may have discoverable evidence that makes doing it a really risky immoral gambit). It wouldn’t do anything to claims of subconscious intent (or even an honest mistake that still has liability under copyright) although the potential damages and settlement may be smaller in that case.
phasersout 5y ago
I think that would actually be a good field for machine learning: To separate sound-alikes from copycats. It always bothers me that these claims are often about a simple melody, while arrangements or rhythm patterns seem to be fair game - if I would use the drum patterns of "Smells like teen spirit" in my song I don't think Grohl could claim anything. But if I would go "Coding in my Pyjamas" with the melody of "Living on a Prayer" I'd have Bon Jovi's lawyers in my mailbox in a heartbeat. But that being said, I think the copyright overall should be a lot more relaxed with a lot more leeway for creatives because the status quo is just ridiculous.
- djur 5y ago
  The recent trend in copyright rulings for music amount to a kind of enclosure of a traditional commons, which should be regarded as a bigger issue than it is. There are entire genres of music based on the adaptation and elaboration of existing melodies. This is an ancient practice, and copyright law has historically fit into gaps in that practice (for instance, covering modern innovations like printed sheet music and recordings), rather than totally overriding it. The law should err on the side of permitting copying. There's enough IP in lyrics, complete arrangements, recordings, etc. (where copying can be clearly demonstrated) to protect the interests of artists.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    So make it legal to re-arrange a song with no profit-sharing?
    - djur 5y ago
      It would be better than the status quo, but I get your point. I think there's a way to set an objective standard that protects extended compositions (film scores, etc.) while not also making jazz illegal.
tomc1985 5y ago
Intellectual property law is so fucked. Once the artsy thing you did is out there, it is no longer yours. Period.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  Do you feel the same way about a novel machine? Once the mechanism is out in the world, it is no longer yours?
  - danamit 5y ago
    Yes.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    If you can't protect the trade secret with secrecy, then it doesn't deserve to be secret. Legal protections have shown, time and time again, that they fuck over inventors, creatives, and artists, in favor of encumbents seeking to consolidate power. The current environment strangles remix culture nearly to death. To say nothing of greedy artists claiming ownership of a concept of notes. I thought you couldn't copyright an idea?
  - vageli 5y ago
    There is a reason patents are limited, and that public display of an invention pre-patent can be prior art. The reality is that once ideas are out in the world the creator is no longer in control (which is why we have to create systems of control via laws). “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” --Thomas Jefferson
  - vasco 5y ago
    This is a philosophical argument depending in your stance regarding ideas being something that can be owned or not. Machines or music doesn't really make any difference.
- xtracto 5y ago
  Right. I remember a lawsuit from one of my favourite guitar players (Joe Satriani) vs Coldplay because of some part of the melody of a song... I thought that was so stupid. Both are great artists and composers. What if someone took a piece of your song and used it to inspire something new? That's called progress...
rectang 5y ago
For folks suggesting that this won't prove you didn't plagiarize a melody somewhere else then "invent" it on video: Melodies are often revised. Capturing the evolution of a melody may show that the final version emerged from an earlier version which bears less resemblance to the source alleged to have been copied. If in fact the melody was plagiarized, then the video evidence might actually document an earlier version where the resemblance was closer. But I expect that Sheeran believes he is not plagiarizing and thus doesn't fear this possibility. More likely, there is only an accidental resemblance between melodies that had no shared origin. In such a case, presenting the creative history would help in a court case.
- robonerd 5y ago
  If the plagiarism was intentional, it would be trivial for the artist to simply not document the portions of the process which would reveal it. He could work out his version from the original whistling to himself in the shower, then go to the studio and start playing other random melodies that he morphs over the course of a few hours into his intended version. Of course, "proof" is beyond the point in these sort of civil trials, but even taken as merely persuasive evidence, I'm not very impressed.
  - rectang 5y ago
    > If the plagiarism was intentional I doubt that any of the high-profile melodic plagiarism cases has ever arisen from some moustache-twirling evil musician deliberately ripping off a melody. That's suicidal, and not guaranteed to produce a hit anyway. They all start with someone plagiarizing subconsciously. If in fact the (unintential) plagiarism was real and the video record reinforced that, there would be incentive to withold the video evidence. But manufacturing evidence is extremely dangerous. It's like trying to spoof a journal from years ago — all it takes is one slip-up and you're doomed.
    - robonerd 5y ago
      I don't know about high-profile melodic plagiarism specifically, but a lot of general plagiarism is absolutely intentional. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility for any particular sort of plagarism.
niek_pas 5y ago
Relevant: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jelling 5y ago
There's a giant difference between randomly hitting on the same melody as an existing massive hit AND then re-using that melody as the first hook in your own song. And Scrubs by TLC is a massive cross-generational hit that Sheeran can't claim not to know without making himself look like a tourist in the pop world. Sheeran's lifting was so blatant I assumed he was intentionally quoting it. Doing that is fine - and it happens regularly, especially in rap and R&B - and is even encouraged when there is overlap in the publishing rights holders (label, publishing company) with the original writer. But royalties should and do follow. So I'm just baffled that he still thinks he is being taken advantage of here. Fwiw, a much less fair copyright infringement case was the Tom Petty vs Sam Smith case around "Won't Back Down" and "Stay with Me." The musical similarity there was much smaller and there are likely scores of gospel songs that use a similar melody.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  It is worth noting that some melodies have a sort of institutional quality -- you can hear them so much they fade into the background of everything, and you become sort of blind to the fact that you "stole" them, and for it to be only blindingly obvious once pointed out. It's actually bizarrely possible he lifted it without realising, and even that other people approved it without realising. Because the tiniest shift of context can make people blind to the obvious. When I was learning to play a new (to me) instrument -- an unusual fretless acoustic instrument -- I worked through a little arrangement of a very, very well known pop song, to teach myself a bunch of chords, progression moves and techniques. I slowed it down, changed its rhythm slightly. But to me it was utterly recognisable. I played a recording to several people who knew pop really well and nobody spotted it. Even though I gave the arrangement a name that was a clear pun on the original title. Once I pointed it out, everyone spotted it. Because it's obvious. But only if you're looking for it. The reason it wasn't easy to spot is the shift in context. Because without crucial elements of context, it's actually only a chord sequence. (Though I really did leave a _lot_ of it in)
  - a_e_k 5y ago
    "Down Under" (1981) and "Kookaburra" (1932) is another good example of that. I can't say that I would ever have noticed the riff without someone pointing it out. And "Kookaburra" is a song that I first heard in grade school, so I'd argue that it has that institutional quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_(song)#Copyright_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_(song)#Copyright_st...
emacs28 5y ago
I feel like it would be possible to write software to tell artists if a song is in danger of copyright infringement of other registered songs. Either by analyzing the raw audio like Shazam does or by feeding the software the transcribed notes on sheet music or something similar. But I guess here the issue was more about whether or not the infringement was intentional.
- after_care 5y ago
  > I feel like it would be possible to write software to tell artists if a song is in danger of copyright infringement of other registered songs. I'm trying to decide if you (as a joke) plagiarized this idea from the popular TV show Silicon Valley. Edit: https://youtu.be/sj9hesuQV6s?t=49 https://youtu.be/sj9hesuQV6s?t=49
  - emacs28 5y ago
    Oh no haha I haven't seen that episode (or forgot about it). That would have been a clever joke though.
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      Probably forgot as it’s the first episode.
- akira2501 5y ago
  It's hard to imagine creative people gathered around a computer waiting for it to judge their newest creation as sufficiently original or not. I imagine the scene would make a great intro for a dystopian sci-fi novel.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
gorgoiler 5y ago
Shape of You is amazing. Sheeran virtue signals about how he prefers to pick up women in bars (not clubs, heaven forfend), the whole song is about how he objectifies his partner, and the music video has him hitting on a woman at the gym while she’s alone and no one is watching. The only way it could possibly be more unpleasant is if he worked in a stanza about how he has mastered the art of picking his nose and eating it while in a moving vehicle. How is this person so popular? Is it because he eats with his hands and with his mouth open while on a date.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > he prefers to pick up women in bars (not clubs, heaven forfend), the whole song is about how he objectifies his partner, and the music video has him hitting on a woman at the gym Where are you supposed to pick up women? Is there a special club you have to join? Falling in love outside of this club of yours is disgusting?
Gollapalli 5y ago
Utterly unrelated, but it’s fascinating how the word film has gone from “putting something on celluloid film” to “recording audiovisual data”, just like tar has gone from “tape archive” to “archive of file(s)” and car/cdr have gone from “address part of the register” and “decrement part of the register”, to first part of the cons pair and last part of the cons pair. As technology develops, words lose their meaning as mnemonics of technological underpinnings and become signifiers of the functionality of a technology.
ss108 5y ago
Can someone explain the similarities between Shape of You, No Diggity, Feeling Good, and No Scrubs? I am apparently literally tone deaf in some sense lol
spawarotti 5y ago
Thought experiment: say to the songwriters accusing Ed Sheeran: we are going to use software to evaluate all the songs you wrote against all other songs in existence. If we find at least one overlap, of any of your songs with any other song in existence that was released before, of the same or longer length as claimed plagiarism, you are getting sued. I wonder if this would change their attitude to the problem.
encryptluks2 5y ago
So now instead of paying for getting sued you also are going to have to pay people $200+ hour to go through hundreds of hours of video and transcribe the contents for a court to show that you didn't steal a song, and in the end they will use the exact same method to determine if you did or didn't than evaluate the evidence that you thought would somehow be beneficial.
gswdh 5y ago
dhx 5y ago
What would copyright infringement look like? Composerily[1] on YouTube is well known for recreating popular songs (example [2]) or making songs in the style of a particular artist (example [3]). Unfortunately the full version of the recreations generally can't be included on YouTube because it would trigger the copyright infringement algorithm. Sometimes Composerily changes the song just enough to avoid the algorithm detecting the similarities, and sometimes Compersily will just provide short samples of the recreation. Through these videos you do get a better sense of how Western pop music is composed and why the choice of a chord progression isn't going to be deemed copyright infringement on its own. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ujq8PBm0MWraaXd8MsIAQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ujq8PBm0MWraaXd8MsIAQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTdmLoXled4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTdmLoXled4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5a4lntstgI&t=326 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5a4lntstgI&t=326
scotty79 5y ago
> There’s the George Harrison point where he said he’s scared to touch the piano because he might be touching someone else’s note. Here's how wonderfully copyright incentivises creativity. And those guys are pros. Imagine what new people might feel.
sireat 5y ago
When I was young I couldn't understand why Vanilla Ice couldn't use Bowie's bass sequence from Under Pressure. Those are different songs! As long as you do not go full Pierre Menard songwriters should be able to "steal" from each other. I miss the late 80s where sampling was supreme - Paul's Boutique, the KLF, pretty much all early house and techno songs heavily sampling from each other. I do wonder if there is any type of underground scene where this type of experimentation is still happening. Obviously it is near impossible in AI policed venues such as Youtube.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
I really passionately hate the “there’s only 12 notes” argument. There’s “only” 26 letters in the alphabet but you don’t see people arguing that your bound to write identical poems to others by random chance There are obviously more to it than that with music. But I just feel like whoever tries to argue “few notes”=“random copying is common” just don’t understand just how big the space of possible combinations of a few common building blocks is.

132 points by hhs 5y ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword. You can't make a living off of a strong copyright system and not expect there to be zero downsides.

stazz1 5y ago
"Live by the blurry bureaucratic tornado, die by the BBT"
- danuker 5y ago
  How Kafkaesque. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
andybak 5y ago
Yeah, I did think that a few successful court cases amounted to not much more than a bit of wealth redistribution. I'm hardly shedding tears for Mr Sheeran.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Karellen 5y ago
Most recording artists don't make their living off of a strong copyright system. The RIAA(/MPAA) cartels - who are the ones behind the strong copyright system - ensure that they get the bulk of the proceeds from recordings, and their distribution, and the protections provided by the copyright system. A lot of this comes from having subsidiaries that allow for music industry equivalents of "Hollywood accounting" to funnel the bulk of profits away from the people who actually make the works. Artists mostly make money from live performances and direct merch sales, which don't depend all that much on copyright. There are maybe one or two unicorns (like Sheeran) who are so successful that they do make buckets of money - but they too serve the industry's ends. They can be pointed at to convince all the new artists trying to break into the biz that the contracts they're getting aren't really that bad, as they too could become the next Ed Sheeran if they try hard enough. The system we have is not one designed by the artists in the music industry.
javert 5y ago
That statement is just blatantly illogical. It's like saying, "if you cook using heat, you can expect to burn yourself sometimes." If you make a living under a strong copyright system, you should expect to be perfectly fine as long as you don't copy someone. Sure, there can be weird exceptions, and as in any complex system, we should adjust the system over time to account for them, rather than immediately throwing out the whole system. For example, when a plane crashes, we don't rush to abolish the FAA, or to ban aviation.
- DiabloD3 5y ago
  Have you never burned yourself cooking? I'm confused at your counterexample.
  - javert 5y ago
    I haven't burned myself in any significant way (i.e. seriously), but apologies for an admittedly imperfect example. Here is a better example: "Live by cooking, expect to die by getting burned." That's the kind of argument OP is making and it's unsound.

skybrian 5y ago

Preserving musical history seems like a nice side effect? If they make a documentary, they'll have more footage.

willnonya 5y ago
Ed Sheeran is not the Beetles. That he's making this footage out of fear of litigation should bother you
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > That he's making this footage out of fear of litigation should bother you I don't see how it protects him at all from litigation. But why would that bother me. Scientists use dated journals with unremovable pages to achieve a similar effect. Why would it bother me that he wants to document his process as legal protection? > Ed Sheeran is not the Beetles. I don't know what you mean by "not the Beetles"? The latest documentaries were about Queen, Elton John, and I think the Ramones. There hasn't been a Beetles movie since when?
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    Peter Jackson just released a new Beatles documentary last year in Disney Plus. That's a major director covering a major band on a major streaming platform. It was big news. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/11/the-beatles-get-back-review-peter-jackson-disney-plus-documentary-1234681499/ https://www.indiewire.com/2021/11/the-beatles-get-back-revie...
  - mellosouls 5y ago
    There hasn't been a Beetles movie since when? Peter Jackson documentary last year! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles:_Get_Back https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles:_Get_Back Yesterday movie 2 years ago https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(2019_film) https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Yesterday_(2019_film) We can't get rid of them - they're so infused in the culture you haven't even noticed!
- skybrian 5y ago

daenz 5y ago

Apparently he was taken to court in March 2022 for a song that was released in 2017. Anyone else think this is very quick result from the justice system? Or did he have this hanging over his head for years before it actually went to court?

jffry 5y ago
Per Wikipedia [1], legal proceedings started in 2018, and the actual court hearing stage happened over the past month. It's not clear how much of that time was waiting for whatever reason, versus ongoing back-and-forth motions and such. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_You#Copyright_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_You#Copyright_trial
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Plus COVID killed the legal system for 2 years. I just went to court on a case yesterday and the judge brought up the docket and we realized the last time we filed anything was 2019.
nikanj 5y ago
Not sure if this is the final result. With tens of millions as the prospective payout, an appeal is always on the horizon
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  The parts in question also admittedly sound quite similar.

strogonoff 5y ago

Ed Sheeran’s filming of his creative process for legal purposes hints at a world where it doesn’t matter if you can improvise a great melody in the moment out of nothing—if they happen to overhear you playing it, any plagiarist with a camera can record a convincing sequence of iterations leading up to your brilliant riff and successfully sue you into oblivion. I wish for a world where musicians make music because they like it more so than to profit; a world where improvising on someone else’s musical idea is considered homage, not theft. (That said, I imagine many bands whose music I like were in fact inspired by fame and riches of rockstars before them.)

_fat_santa 5y ago
The problem as I see it, when you get that famous, you look like a piggy bank to some people. Say you were walking down the street and tripped over someones foot, most likely you apologize and move on. But if Ed was walking down the street and tripped over the wrong persons foot, that person would quickly turn it into "I'm suing", "you hurt my foot", "I will need therapy", "I think I need to go the hospital". Now none of those things may be true but they are all in service of one goal: "I just had an interaction with someone super famous and super rich, let me see how much I can extract from them for my own gain".
- alan-hn 5y ago
  That's because the US (and many other 'westernized' locales) have this shitty ideology where the individual matters more than other individuals or the collective. It's why the US has so many scammers and fraudsters. Edit: this is from my perspective living in the US. I'm not saying that the US has more scammers than other places, just a ton due to this western ideology. My comment about the ideology includes places such as Europe and possibly even China now
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    Once one asserts that the plural precedes the singluar, fresh vistas of tyranny open to whoever is in control.

MarcoZavala 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

At some point for professionals the cost of continual recording is relatively low. However; once you have a policy of doing it gaps in the recording could come back to bite you.

larodi 5y ago

This all only matters for people trying to ‘compose’ trivial melodies and make them into hits. Who are these people - everyone in pop industry. But only few, like Max Martin, know how to devise a simple, yet original melody… and perhaps there are only that many of these riffs.

ironmagma 5y ago
“Original” is a bit of a sham. There is a vanishingly small chance that any newly created work would actually be unique and new to the world. At the very least, all the usable chord progressions and listenable rhythms for pop have been discovered already.
unfocussed_mike 5y ago
This is really an absurd oversimplification. Almost every great melody is "trivial". And almost no original melody is actually original.

treyfitty 5y ago

How does filming “song writing sessions” help here? A songwriter could be grocery shopping and hear a tune they like and copy it. I don’t understand how filming just sessions will protect anyone.

mbreese 5y ago
I think the key is the progression. If you see how a melody is formed, then it’s more likely to be organic. If you are just copying something, there is less of a progression as when you’re video recording, it’s already almost “done”.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  That doesn't answer the question. You could be out buying groceries, hear a good tune, and then pretend you invented it in steps when you get back to your studio. Just like we pretend we figured out the tortoise/hare algorithm for finding loops in linked lists at interviews.
- jancsika 5y ago
  Maybe if you were a mid-19th Century German composer it worked something like that. But that's just not how most songwriting works. E.g., according to Mark Ronson: 1. Amy Winehouse casually spoke the following sentence in a conversation with Mark Ronson: "They tried to make me go to Rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'" 2. Mark Ronson said, "That could be a song." 3. They went to the studio where Amy Winehouse played a 12-bar blues chord progression on the guitar and sang those lyrics (using a simple pentatonic scale). 4. Mark suggested to speed it up and do a throwback Motown-era arrangement. 5. Done. Unless they recorded their entire conversation, all you'd get is Winehouse sitting down with a guitar and singing the entire hook of the song. If anything, anxiety-fueled "song formation" recordings will just cause songwriters to waste time going in the wrong direction. That is, they'll take their ready-to-go phrases or sub-phrases of music and sing fragments into the mic, in an order that seems as if they are constructing what they already have formed in their ear. Edit: clarification
vasco 5y ago
It discourages the ones suing because they'll be less sure they'll win.

curiousgal 5y ago

I mean there are only so many notes, the combination must have been all covered by now, right? So some overlap between songs is to be expected I assume.

lordnacho 5y ago
I think that depends a lot on what your definition of "close" is. If you have notes and lengths, you can generate a fairly big space just from that. I'm no music expert but you could ask whether transposing the notes up and down the scale counts as a new "thing", along with any number of other ways of generating a new tune from an existing one.
danuker 5y ago
Every 8-note, 12-beat melody combo is in CC0: https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-copyright https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-cop...

danuker 5y ago

You can pick a CC0 melody from this list: > The goal: to copyright every single combo in order to give it to the public so musicians and artists can use melodies without worrying about copyright issues down the line. > The algorithm created by the two programmer-musicians can put together every single 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-copyright https://mashable.com/article/music-melody-algorithm-midi-cop...

HWR_14 5y ago
That's not going to hold up in court. They cannot claim a copyright to exhaustive computer generated corpus. Even if they could, it doesn't make sense. You don't get to ignore every books copyright just because you read a dictionary.
- addsubtract 5y ago
  This isn’t reading the dictionary, it’s similar to generating new unique sentences and claiming copyright on that. Right?
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    It's creating 12 long sequences from 12 notes. That sounds far closer to a dictionary than anything else.
- danuker 5y ago
  > They cannot claim a copyright to exhaustive computer generated corpus. And why not? For example, a UK law specifically mentions "computer-generated" work: > If the work is computer-generated, copyright expires fifty years after the work is made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents... Is there any law you based the word "cannot" on? Is there a limitation on the extent of such copyright claims a person can make? Even though physically one couldn't write it on paper during one's lifetime?
  - 5y ago

bufferoverflow 5y ago

I don't see how filming proves that you didn't steal a melody. You could've memorized it off camera and just pretended you invented it on the spot.

Supermancho 5y ago
> I don't see how filming proves that you didn't steal a melody. What you think of as "proof" and what serves as "proof" in court are wildly different things, because court cases are largely decided on subjective merits. ie You aren't likely to be part of the jury, so hypothetical situations are simply that. I can imagine observing a live narrative that looks improvised and creative. At that point, I'm not sure what other material difference there needs to be for me. This kind of decision isn't a life-or-death situation, so the bar is lower than absolute certainty.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > court cases are largely decided on subjective merits Would add that civil cases are tried on a preponderance of evidence standard, not beyond reasonable doubt.
  - djur 5y ago
    Yes. Right now these cases are essentially coin flips -- will this specific judge think that these two songs sound similar enough that there's a >50% likelihood that the defendants had heard the plaintiff's work? Which is why in the long term the only solution for lawsuits like this is to change the law so that mere melodic/rhythmic similarity is not sufficient to file suit.
deleted 5y ago
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throwthere 5y ago
The best the video could do is support the defense around conscious intent. It’s not proof of that as you say because it could be a ruse (although a ruse may have discoverable evidence that makes doing it a really risky immoral gambit). It wouldn’t do anything to claims of subconscious intent (or even an honest mistake that still has liability under copyright) although the potential damages and settlement may be smaller in that case.

phasersout 5y ago

I think that would actually be a good field for machine learning: To separate sound-alikes from copycats. It always bothers me that these claims are often about a simple melody, while arrangements or rhythm patterns seem to be fair game - if I would use the drum patterns of "Smells like teen spirit" in my song I don't think Grohl could claim anything. But if I would go "Coding in my Pyjamas" with the melody of "Living on a Prayer" I'd have Bon Jovi's lawyers in my mailbox in a heartbeat. But that being said, I think the copyright overall should be a lot more relaxed with a lot more leeway for creatives because the status quo is just ridiculous.

djur 5y ago
The recent trend in copyright rulings for music amount to a kind of enclosure of a traditional commons, which should be regarded as a bigger issue than it is. There are entire genres of music based on the adaptation and elaboration of existing melodies. This is an ancient practice, and copyright law has historically fit into gaps in that practice (for instance, covering modern innovations like printed sheet music and recordings), rather than totally overriding it. The law should err on the side of permitting copying. There's enough IP in lyrics, complete arrangements, recordings, etc. (where copying can be clearly demonstrated) to protect the interests of artists.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  So make it legal to re-arrange a song with no profit-sharing?
  - djur 5y ago
    It would be better than the status quo, but I get your point. I think there's a way to set an objective standard that protects extended compositions (film scores, etc.) while not also making jazz illegal.

tomc1985 5y ago

Intellectual property law is so fucked. Once the artsy thing you did is out there, it is no longer yours. Period.

germinalphrase 5y ago
Do you feel the same way about a novel machine? Once the mechanism is out in the world, it is no longer yours?
- danamit 5y ago
  Yes.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  If you can't protect the trade secret with secrecy, then it doesn't deserve to be secret. Legal protections have shown, time and time again, that they fuck over inventors, creatives, and artists, in favor of encumbents seeking to consolidate power. The current environment strangles remix culture nearly to death. To say nothing of greedy artists claiming ownership of a concept of notes. I thought you couldn't copyright an idea?
- vageli 5y ago
  There is a reason patents are limited, and that public display of an invention pre-patent can be prior art. The reality is that once ideas are out in the world the creator is no longer in control (which is why we have to create systems of control via laws). “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” --Thomas Jefferson
- vasco 5y ago
  This is a philosophical argument depending in your stance regarding ideas being something that can be owned or not. Machines or music doesn't really make any difference.
xtracto 5y ago
Right. I remember a lawsuit from one of my favourite guitar players (Joe Satriani) vs Coldplay because of some part of the melody of a song... I thought that was so stupid. Both are great artists and composers. What if someone took a piece of your song and used it to inspire something new? That's called progress...

rectang 5y ago

For folks suggesting that this won't prove you didn't plagiarize a melody somewhere else then "invent" it on video: Melodies are often revised. Capturing the evolution of a melody may show that the final version emerged from an earlier version which bears less resemblance to the source alleged to have been copied. If in fact the melody was plagiarized, then the video evidence might actually document an earlier version where the resemblance was closer. But I expect that Sheeran believes he is not plagiarizing and thus doesn't fear this possibility. More likely, there is only an accidental resemblance between melodies that had no shared origin. In such a case, presenting the creative history would help in a court case.

robonerd 5y ago
If the plagiarism was intentional, it would be trivial for the artist to simply not document the portions of the process which would reveal it. He could work out his version from the original whistling to himself in the shower, then go to the studio and start playing other random melodies that he morphs over the course of a few hours into his intended version. Of course, "proof" is beyond the point in these sort of civil trials, but even taken as merely persuasive evidence, I'm not very impressed.
- rectang 5y ago
  > If the plagiarism was intentional I doubt that any of the high-profile melodic plagiarism cases has ever arisen from some moustache-twirling evil musician deliberately ripping off a melody. That's suicidal, and not guaranteed to produce a hit anyway. They all start with someone plagiarizing subconsciously. If in fact the (unintential) plagiarism was real and the video record reinforced that, there would be incentive to withold the video evidence. But manufacturing evidence is extremely dangerous. It's like trying to spoof a journal from years ago — all it takes is one slip-up and you're doomed.
  - robonerd 5y ago
    I don't know about high-profile melodic plagiarism specifically, but a lot of general plagiarism is absolutely intentional. So I wouldn't rule out the possibility for any particular sort of plagarism.

niek_pas 5y ago

Relevant: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw

deleted 5y ago

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jelling 5y ago

There's a giant difference between randomly hitting on the same melody as an existing massive hit AND then re-using that melody as the first hook in your own song. And Scrubs by TLC is a massive cross-generational hit that Sheeran can't claim not to know without making himself look like a tourist in the pop world. Sheeran's lifting was so blatant I assumed he was intentionally quoting it. Doing that is fine - and it happens regularly, especially in rap and R&B - and is even encouraged when there is overlap in the publishing rights holders (label, publishing company) with the original writer. But royalties should and do follow. So I'm just baffled that he still thinks he is being taken advantage of here. Fwiw, a much less fair copyright infringement case was the Tom Petty vs Sam Smith case around "Won't Back Down" and "Stay with Me." The musical similarity there was much smaller and there are likely scores of gospel songs that use a similar melody.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
It is worth noting that some melodies have a sort of institutional quality -- you can hear them so much they fade into the background of everything, and you become sort of blind to the fact that you "stole" them, and for it to be only blindingly obvious once pointed out. It's actually bizarrely possible he lifted it without realising, and even that other people approved it without realising. Because the tiniest shift of context can make people blind to the obvious. When I was learning to play a new (to me) instrument -- an unusual fretless acoustic instrument -- I worked through a little arrangement of a very, very well known pop song, to teach myself a bunch of chords, progression moves and techniques. I slowed it down, changed its rhythm slightly. But to me it was utterly recognisable. I played a recording to several people who knew pop really well and nobody spotted it. Even though I gave the arrangement a name that was a clear pun on the original title. Once I pointed it out, everyone spotted it. Because it's obvious. But only if you're looking for it. The reason it wasn't easy to spot is the shift in context. Because without crucial elements of context, it's actually only a chord sequence. (Though I really did leave a _lot_ of it in)
- a_e_k 5y ago
  "Down Under" (1981) and "Kookaburra" (1932) is another good example of that. I can't say that I would ever have noticed the riff without someone pointing it out. And "Kookaburra" is a song that I first heard in grade school, so I'd argue that it has that institutional quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_(song)#Copyright_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kookaburra_(song)#Copyright_st...

emacs28 5y ago

I feel like it would be possible to write software to tell artists if a song is in danger of copyright infringement of other registered songs. Either by analyzing the raw audio like Shazam does or by feeding the software the transcribed notes on sheet music or something similar. But I guess here the issue was more about whether or not the infringement was intentional.

after_care 5y ago
> I feel like it would be possible to write software to tell artists if a song is in danger of copyright infringement of other registered songs. I'm trying to decide if you (as a joke) plagiarized this idea from the popular TV show Silicon Valley. Edit: https://youtu.be/sj9hesuQV6s?t=49 https://youtu.be/sj9hesuQV6s?t=49
- emacs28 5y ago
  Oh no haha I haven't seen that episode (or forgot about it). That would have been a clever joke though.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    Probably forgot as it’s the first episode.
akira2501 5y ago
It's hard to imagine creative people gathered around a computer waiting for it to judge their newest creation as sufficiently original or not. I imagine the scene would make a great intro for a dystopian sci-fi novel.
deleted 5y ago
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gorgoiler 5y ago

Shape of You is amazing. Sheeran virtue signals about how he prefers to pick up women in bars (not clubs, heaven forfend), the whole song is about how he objectifies his partner, and the music video has him hitting on a woman at the gym while she’s alone and no one is watching. The only way it could possibly be more unpleasant is if he worked in a stanza about how he has mastered the art of picking his nose and eating it while in a moving vehicle. How is this person so popular? Is it because he eats with his hands and with his mouth open while on a date.

lelanthran 5y ago
> he prefers to pick up women in bars (not clubs, heaven forfend), the whole song is about how he objectifies his partner, and the music video has him hitting on a woman at the gym Where are you supposed to pick up women? Is there a special club you have to join? Falling in love outside of this club of yours is disgusting?

Gollapalli 5y ago

Utterly unrelated, but it’s fascinating how the word film has gone from “putting something on celluloid film” to “recording audiovisual data”, just like tar has gone from “tape archive” to “archive of file(s)” and car/cdr have gone from “address part of the register” and “decrement part of the register”, to first part of the cons pair and last part of the cons pair. As technology develops, words lose their meaning as mnemonics of technological underpinnings and become signifiers of the functionality of a technology.

ss108 5y ago

Can someone explain the similarities between Shape of You, No Diggity, Feeling Good, and No Scrubs? I am apparently literally tone deaf in some sense lol

spawarotti 5y ago

Thought experiment: say to the songwriters accusing Ed Sheeran: we are going to use software to evaluate all the songs you wrote against all other songs in existence. If we find at least one overlap, of any of your songs with any other song in existence that was released before, of the same or longer length as claimed plagiarism, you are getting sued. I wonder if this would change their attitude to the problem.

encryptluks2 5y ago

So now instead of paying for getting sued you also are going to have to pay people $200+ hour to go through hundreds of hours of video and transcribe the contents for a court to show that you didn't steal a song, and in the end they will use the exact same method to determine if you did or didn't than evaluate the evidence that you thought would somehow be beneficial.

gswdh 5y ago

dhx 5y ago

What would copyright infringement look like? Composerily[1] on YouTube is well known for recreating popular songs (example [2]) or making songs in the style of a particular artist (example [3]). Unfortunately the full version of the recreations generally can't be included on YouTube because it would trigger the copyright infringement algorithm. Sometimes Composerily changes the song just enough to avoid the algorithm detecting the similarities, and sometimes Compersily will just provide short samples of the recreation. Through these videos you do get a better sense of how Western pop music is composed and why the choice of a chord progression isn't going to be deemed copyright infringement on its own. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ujq8PBm0MWraaXd8MsIAQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8Ujq8PBm0MWraaXd8MsIAQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTdmLoXled4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTdmLoXled4 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5a4lntstgI&t=326 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5a4lntstgI&t=326

scotty79 5y ago

> There’s the George Harrison point where he said he’s scared to touch the piano because he might be touching someone else’s note. Here's how wonderfully copyright incentivises creativity. And those guys are pros. Imagine what new people might feel.

sireat 5y ago

When I was young I couldn't understand why Vanilla Ice couldn't use Bowie's bass sequence from Under Pressure. Those are different songs! As long as you do not go full Pierre Menard songwriters should be able to "steal" from each other. I miss the late 80s where sampling was supreme - Paul's Boutique, the KLF, pretty much all early house and techno songs heavily sampling from each other. I do wonder if there is any type of underground scene where this type of experimentation is still happening. Obviously it is near impossible in AI policed venues such as Youtube.

isitmadeofglass 5y ago

I really passionately hate the “there’s only 12 notes” argument. There’s “only” 26 letters in the alphabet but you don’t see people arguing that your bound to write identical poems to others by random chance There are obviously more to it than that with music. But I just feel like whoever tries to argue “few notes”=“random copying is common” just don’t understand just how big the space of possible combinations of a few common building blocks is.