
Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits - vo2maxer
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/music-copyright-lawsuits-chilling-effect-935310/
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bediger4000
This would seem to be making the case that copyright is not serving its
explicit purpose: to increase the size of the public domain. That public
domain's value is even acknowledged in the article: there's no "virgin birth"
for music or some such pithy aphorism.

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simonblack
Unintended consequences of excessively long copyright periods.

Couldn't happen to a nicer industry.

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bitwize
This is the exact scenario black musicians have been agitating for for
decades. Funk and R&B artists in particular have found themselves frustrated
that their grooves -- the bits that actually _make_ the song -- can be lifted
wholesale by other artists because historically copyright law only concerned
itself with melody.

The Blurred Lines ruling makes it clear that grooves are, in fact,
copyrightable. Maybe we'll see the benefits as musicians are forced to
innovate.

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zozbot234
The Blurred Lines case was not about rhythmic grooves, it was basically about
instrumentation/orchestration and to a lesser extent about basic harmonic
elements. There are very good reasons to enable "lifting" of these things,
namely because they're basically functional elements - there's only so many
instrumentation choices you can make in any given song, and often it's even
forced by e.g. your genre choice (rock'n'roll, jazz, funk, R&B, what have
you). If you want genres to evolve freely, that's not going to happen if
everyone who writes in a genre has to pay copyright to whoever happened to be
first in experimenting with that one weird choice in instrumentation.

