Monday, February 24, 2020
Attempt To Put Every Musical Melody Into The Public Domain Demonstrates Craziness Of Modern Copyright
Techdirt: The fact is that many of the copyright lawsuits we see coming out of the music industry mostly revolve around copyright claims on musical melodies. In many of these cases, artists find themselves on the losing end of judges and juries all while claiming that there was no intention to infringe, with the supposedly offending material instead being developed as essentially an independent creation that happened to be similar to previous works.
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2 comments:
This argument on copyright laws and copyright infringement is very interesting, but also makes a lot of sense in terms of the specificity of this circumstance. I think the creation of copyright laws comes from a good place, and has the potential to be helpful in many different situations, but I also think there is a lot of stupidity and redundancy that comes into play with these rules. I like Riehl’s way of playing copyright laws at their own game, because it calls out the stupidity that is brought up in the article. The idea of putting these melodies in a public domain would mitigate the copyright craziness that is associated with a lot of music now, especially since the melodies in popular music today is so repetitive. My only question is will this take away the natural artistic creation of musicians- since all of the possible combinations have been created and developed, even though they are in the public domain?
I find this concept so funny. I love that he wants to take so much time to collect all billions of the possibilities and make them open for public use. I think this is a very creative way around the problem. Loopholes are truly a gift to everyone and especially lawyers. I do find it interesting how there are literally over 68 billion different melodies, and yet there are still so many copyright lawsuits regarding music all the time. I do think that a lot of copyright lawsuits recently have been strong cases but they provided the same excuse that it was too basic so nothing happened. In terms of how many different melodies that an artist could choose from, I think a lot of people do not truly understand how much 1 billion is let alone 68 billion. That is so much it is almost endless, and music has really only been largely public in the last century and a half if even that, so I find it hard to believe that current day artists could not come up with an alternate melody that was not already used and popular.
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