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from the Gets-worse-before-it-can-get-better dept.
How low can copyright law go? Much further if the current lawsuits being flung around are any indication. Ed Sheeran is taking a hiatus to deal with a copyright claim from Sam Chokri against his song Shape Of You. The suit accuses Sheeran of stealing the Chorus from the song Oh Why after Chokri voluntarily submitted it to Sheeran's management. The resemblance between the tracks is said to be 'very slight', but this is not the first time Sheeran has been challenged in this matter, with the previous accusation being resolved by adding songwriting credits for parts borrowed from TLC's No Scrubs. Sam Smith caved in to Tom Petty's claim that his song Stay with me was in some way related to I Want Back Down, which must take a musician to spot, while Katy Perry lost a suit filed by a Christian hip hop artist who claimed that her song Dark Horse infringed on Joyful Noise due to that they both have "a slightly similar sharp stabbing synth and a basic trap beat" which resulted in Petty's lawyer commenting that “they’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone.” With these big names being taken down by claims of similarity of the "feel" of the music this may be the beginning of the end of the music industry shooting itself in the foot.
Money better spent on hookers and blow.
See also, the short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 08 2019, @03:57PM
Not music industry. Record industry. With MBAs and lawyers running and profiting for the most part. The musicians are merely the exploited employees with a fortunate few that scapegoat for the industry abuse. Sorta like pointing at the one lottery winner or athlete in a mining town to say they're all winners. And for the record industry, old contracts pay more dividends so it's profitable to have dead artists' relatives sue contemporary musicians. More importantly, it creates a dependency on big labels that can afford litigating so even when they've long passed any productive business model, they can still maintain a level of income through legal fees.
The ideal for the record industry is for every single possible song to be copyrighted so nothing new could be written without paying some royalties to them just like in Melancholy Elephants. One man's dystopia is another utopia and all that.