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Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

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Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#51

Post by sitkack »

gregmac wrote: post #44
ericcholis wrote: post #9

Good video breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ytoUuO-qvg

The video is absolutely worth watching, but one of the more relevant bits is this: > [...] in Dark Horse it's just the background texture for one of the verses. It has the same musical function as a chord progression or a drum groove: it serves to highlight the melody but it's not the song itself. Up until this point it seemed like only melodies could be copyrighted in the composition of song, however the recent cour…

I don't understand why a Jury of Peers [1] wouldn't be comprised of domain experts and not just random people off the street. And it seems like having domain knowledge is likely to get one NOT selected for jury duty. Can any lawyers chime in on this (even armchair hn lawyers)?

[1] https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/what-is-a-ju...

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#53

Post by mc32 »

gregmac wrote: post #44
ericcholis wrote: post #9

Good video breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ytoUuO-qvg

The video is absolutely worth watching, but one of the more relevant bits is this: > [...] in Dark Horse it's just the background texture for one of the verses. It has the same musical function as a chord progression or a drum groove: it serves to highlight the melody but it's not the song itself. Up until this point it seemed like only melodies could be copyrighted in the composition of song, however the recent cour…

But most of the people listening to his arguments are also not experts. I’d rather see him arguing with an expert who could have counter arguments. I’d like to believe him but right now I have to take his word for it.

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#54

Post by officemonkey »

ptah wrote: post #32
thedaemon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not a musician I take it. If you play punk style music, you are playing 8-16 of the same notes in a row. 16 notes are nothing.

i am actually a musician, the rhythm is important and a sequence of 16 notes at the same rhythm and the same tonal distance is too big to be a coincidence

So you're saying that every "Boogie Woogie" piano song is infringing if they play more than two bars of a boogie woogie riff.

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#55

Post by ilamont »

In the early 1990s I worked for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label, back when they were dominating the UK and European pop charts as The KLF (https://weirdestbandintheworld.com/2011/10/20/the-klf/).

One day we received in the mail a cassette tape and a letter from a law firm representing a composer or publisher (I can't remember which) of a famous Broadway soundtrack from the 1960s. The letter accused the KLF of infringement. The cassette contained one of the songs on the Broadway soundtrack, an instrumental section of which repeated a three note riff that sounded a lot like the same three-note sequence from one of the KLFs biggest hits. The rhythms and song structures were otherwise nothing alike.

It didn't seem like an obvious example of copying, and it was quite possible it was a coincidence or some obscure influence on The KLF or their core musical collaborators, who would have been youths when the Broadway soundtrack was released.

"Are you going to fight this?" I asked the label's president.

The answer: "No."

From The KLF's perspective, it wasn't worth a long, expensive legal fight they might lose. The KLF had been burned before for rampant unauthorized sampling in a previous incarnation of the band called The JAMMs, as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_(What_the_Fuck_Is_Going_O...

Also, the label president didn't say it, but potential bad press could have also been on her mind. At the time, the KLF had the British music press eating out of their hands, and a public legal fight could change the narrative of the KLF as being brilliant pop iconoclasts to something less favorable.

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#56

Post by JustSomeNobody »

I don't know much about music, but there's only so many ways to arrange notes and of those ways there are far fewer ways to arrange them that sound ... pleasing to the ear.

What happens when all the pleasing ways are copyrighted and owned by some sort of Pantone for music?

Good grief what are we becoming?

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#57

Post by CalChris »

aaronarduino wrote: post #5
iamben wrote: post #4

I posted this the other day. Absolutely terrible, IMO. A minor artist can take millions from an artist who releases a song with a passing resemblance. You can hear similarities in SO many songs. And SO many songs are inspired by others - great art is full of inspiration. I dread where this ends up.

This sort of feels like the start of the music business's version of patent trolls. I think this verdict devalues music and hampers creativity.

Defending patent trolls here for a moment but agreeing nonetheless.

Patent trolls have a higher bar since they at least need a patent which is somewhat difficult to get. You actually have to prosecute, that's the legal term, your patent application through the patent system and nowadays survive an inevitable IPR challenge from the FAANG companies. It takes a year or two and a bit of money.

A copyright by comparison is utterly effortless, meaning that this sort of suit is also utterly trivial. Not good.

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#58

Post by lukecameron »

120bits wrote: post #22

I was wondering, does Shazam can differentiate well between these two songs? I'm not entirely sure about the internal working of it, but was curious to know how these pattern recognition apps can help in this. Also, reminds me of the Silicon Valley where Richard was able to disproof Patent troll by using his music/search app.

The technique you're looking for is Acoustic Fingerprinting [1]. There's a pretty easily understandable python implementation[2] of it if you're interested. In Shazam's case it is looking for peaks in the sound's spectrograph, so I don't think it would likely confuse two songs based on melody alone. It would have to be very close in rhythm, melody, and possibly even be in the same key.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint [2] - https://github.com/worldveil/dejavu

Re: Katy Perry's Dark Horse Lawsuit Makes Waves in Music Industry

#60

Post by sudosteph »

I would be more sympathetic to Katy Perry's case here if I could ever get past the fact that a major part of "Firework" sounds so much like Erasure's "Always".

I'm all for creative freedom, but massively profitable pop music labels shouldn't be able to just crib the essence a catchy melody and make it the whole basis of their song just because the person who wrote the original version wasn't that popular. If it really was a coincidence in this case, then it's unfortunate, but it isn't life-changing to someone as well-off as her. If the original composer really was copied from though, actually being credited and received recognition as deserved, could be life-changing, so I don't blame him for suing.

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