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The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

nytimes.com

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Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#91

Post by champagneben »

wahern wrote: post #76
nicholassmith wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a terrible argument isn't it? There's a finite number of musical notes, a finite structure to them and a finite number of effects. We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner rather than later.

> We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner rather than later. Technically that's fine. Copyright only protects originality, not novelty as with patents. Coincidentally creating the same melody as someone else doesn't violate their copyright. If they sued they'd have to prove that it wasn't coincidental with evidence that you heard the original melody, a prerequisite for proving that y…

Wow - never knew that!

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#92

Post by FeteCommuniste »

moomin wrote: post #6

My (least) favourite example of this is that Iggy Azalea gets a song-writing credit for Classic Man. http://www.mtv.com/news/2215334/iggy-azalea-fancy-classic-ma... If you listen to the two, you can spot the similarity but... it’s nowhere close to sampling or plagiarism. They’ve got different melodies, different feels, just a similar prominent keyboard sound. But no-one wants a court case, so the writers of Fancy get…

Not exactly an unusual or highly distinctive sound, either. I could see it being a preset on any number of synths. Weird.

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#93

Post by WalterBright »

gota wrote: post #87
WalterBright wrote: post #74

A reasonable thing would be to consider "fair use" as any clip less than, say, 10 seconds.

What if the entire piece of media is really short and 10 seconds is most or all of it? I'm not sure there are simple and reasonable solutions like this. Everything will be gamed or cause terrible edge case issues

I heard (and have no idea if it is true or not) that back in the 80s Microsoft was not particularly concerned about piracy, because it was great advertising and often led to people buying the product.

DOS was indeed pirated all over the place, and Microsoft rose to be the biggest company in the world. Cause and effect? Who knows!

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#94

Post by rock_hard »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #88
rock_hard wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been a while that I read it but generally speaking: 1. How to strip things down to their essence and focus on that. 2. What to expect and not to expect from Being successful 3. Being scrappy as fuck Just read it...it’s available for free online as pdf...it’s quick and super fun read

The elements which stuck in my head were: 1. Steal the drum and bass from an old soul record, don't try to engineer your own. 2. For lyrics, use things you hear shop clerks saying. 3. (from the opening of the book) "Start off skint and on the dole." Did you do any of those?

Did all of them

We would usually program the bass ourselves for the type of music we made but the progressions were battle tested decades earlier

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#95

Post by gota »

WalterBright wrote: post #90
gota wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the entire piece of media is really short and 10 seconds is most or all of it? I'm not sure there are simple and reasonable solutions like this. Everything will be gamed or cause terrible edge case issues

> What if the entire piece of media is really short and 10 seconds is most or all of it? If the creator cared, he'd make it longer. Seriously, why should a 5 second movie be worthy of major copyright protection? For example, if I wrote a 100 line computer program, should that be worthy of copyright protection. I'd say "no". A creator of a 10-second movie should consider it advertising for his skills, and hope and pra…

>I f the creator cared, he'd make it longer.

I'm sorry, and would like to know how to put it another way to not sound aggressive, but this point is absurd[1].

Length (in this case runtime) of the resulting product has little to no relation to the amount of work or value put into it and its development[2].

1- I'm not even sure why'd you use code as an example, because it is the easiest counterexample to your point. Hundred-line programs can be trivial exercises or crucial pieces of engineering that make or break entire products or businesses (if code should or not be copyrightable is another discussion).

2 - Somehow this discussion also reminds of the time a bureaucrat asked me why I was taking twenty hours to 'read a paper' when it was only a few pages long. I told him it likely took the authors a hundred hours to write six pages rather than sixteen so I could read it in twenty hours instead of two hundred.

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#96

Post by rock_hard »

ilamont wrote: post #70
rock_hard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to keep this account disconnected from my real life persona so won’t name names. But we had a series of number ones around the world in countries like the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, Brasil, France, Italy, China, Australia...really every country you have ever heard of. Of course some of the tactics had to be translated into 2000s world but I still recommend aspiring music artists to read it when they ask m…

I always remembered the line from the book about finding a bass line being like a "panther on the prowl" and IIRC mentioning Billie Jean or some other Michael Jackson song as an example. It really made sense. The same section also warned against hiring some "thumb-slapping dickhead" to play bass which made sense from their perspective (The KLF never used bass players) but doesn't hold true for all types of songs, eve…

I remember now

One of my takeaways was to not try to do everything yourself...if fact to try to do nothing yourself except piecing together existing stuff in novel ways

I just watched a YouTube video of one of the producers of Demi Lovato and he frames it like this:

“What makes a great producer is not the ability to play any instrument or be a good engineer or anything. You can find others to do that for you. What makes a great producer is the ability to know how to tell a compelling story with your work!”

Paraphrased from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kre17S89-j8

I think this is true for any product...your are selling people on a story/vision...of what could be, not what is!

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#97

Post by kxrm »

WalterBright wrote: post #74

A reasonable thing would be to consider "fair use" as any clip less than, say, 10 seconds.

What about small promos or jingles or a ringtone? Would they just not be copyrightable? I think this is harder to define when you consider that "music" expands further than just the traditional 5 minute song on Spotify or the radio.

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#98

Post by WalterBright »

kxrm wrote: post #97
WalterBright wrote: post #74

A reasonable thing would be to consider "fair use" as any clip less than, say, 10 seconds.

What about small promos or jingles or a ringtone? Would they just not be copyrightable? I think this is harder to define when you consider that "music" expands further than just the traditional 5 minute song on Spotify or the radio.

> Would they just not be copyrightable?

Why not?

(BTW, short stuff can be trademarked, as long as you use it as branding in commerce.)

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#99

Post by WalterBright »

gota wrote: post #95
WalterBright wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the entire piece of media is really short and 10 seconds is most or all of it? If the creator cared, he'd make it longer. Seriously, why should a 5 second movie be worthy of major copyright protection? For example, if I wrote a 100 line computer program, should that be worthy of copyright protection. I'd say "no". A creator of a 10-second movie should consider it advertising for his skills, and hope and pra…

>I f the creator cared, he'd make it longer. I'm sorry, and would like to know how to put it another way to not sound aggressive, but this point is absurd[1]. Length (in this case runtime) of the resulting product has little to no relation to the amount of work or value put into it and its development[2]. 1- I'm not even sure why'd you use code as an example, because it is the easiest counterexample to your point. Hu…

You can already do "fair use" of text under a certain amount, and the world hasn't ended.

> a hundred hours

This is the Labor Theory of Value, which is discredited. The value of something is not necessarily related at all to how much labor was put into it. The value of something is what someone else is freely willing to pay for it.

Nobody has ever asked me how many hours I put into X. They couldn't care less. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of what I created.

Re: The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

#100

Post by onion2k »

gamblor956 wrote: post #85
midgetjones wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He did demand royalties, he gets a 40% cut as well.

Roughly 40% of the lyrics are dialogue from two of his movies or describing scenes from those movies (Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs), so a 40% cut of the songwriters' share of royalties is appropriate.

He didn't write any of the song. He just made something that contributed to it.

Saying he wrote part of it is like the person who mixed Davinci's paint claiming to have painted part of the Mona Lisa.

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