> they share identical four opening bars. They are not even close to identical. They share openings that can be made to sound identical if you just play the s

> they share identical four opening bars. They are not even close to identical. They share openings that can be made to sound identical if you just play the sheet music with a few tweaks (like changing key) but if you listen to the actual recordings no one would have any trouble telling them apart. In fact, I'll bet if you played the opening bars of the actual recordings to someone who was not trained in music it would not even occur to them that they were similar in any way. We could do an experiment: I'll bet I could find five songs that are similar enough to LGIO that if you played the original recordings of those songs along with TOL and LGIO to test subjects who had not heard any of those songs before, that they could not pick out TOL and LGIO as the allegedly infringing pair with odds better than chance. > The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work. Yes, but that's irrelevant. An infringing work is an infringing work no matter how it was produced. Of course, the most likely way that an infringing work gets produced is by copying, but this is exactly the problem: the more you allow people to claim copyright over things with little information content (like a chord progression containing only three chords), and the broader a net you allow it to cast, the more likely it becomes that someone produces an infringing work by pure chance. > people do get away with fan fiction these days Only if they don't make money off of it. > a judge trial would have ended differently There is no way to know. But if you're right, then thank God for juries because sometimes that is our last bastion of defense against corporate overreach.