Ed Sheeran demonstrates how copyright is destroying musicians
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That was back in 2016. If you applied machine learning to pop music, you could probably establish a classifier for melodies that don't sound awful, and get that number down into the millions. Spotify has about 100,000 uploaded tracks. The space of listenable pop music may become fully populated. It would be amusing to have something that classifies songs as "Standard melody #67426564".
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats... [2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...
That seems really high and really low at the same time.
https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/#:~:text=over%2010...
There is nothing by eg The Blues Brothers outside the two movies and their debut album. Nothing by Spocks Beard prior to Neal Morse leaving the band. Other albums are stripped of specific songs because a guest artist wasnt part of the overall deal.
There are probably countless other examples as well, and as artists are moving away from physical media completely I fear that entire artist will disappear in the future because they happened to be pulled from streaming services.
Uh... That's off by an order of magnitude. 100 million tracks according to https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/
/s
Same HN user: That’s wrong, the distance is an order of magnitude greater than that (read: 1050 times)
[0] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2807622?hl=en-GB
It's very odd to not see the similarity between the two claims and how one exists as a critique of the other.
Don't know what you mean by rythm.
Did you ever played by notes and as such learned to read them?
A-B-C is very different than A~~~------B-C~, for example, even if it's still the same three notes in the same order.
But in the end the only thing that enforces any rule/ownership/law is violence, we just often do not have to go so far as we know it is not worth it.
>Don't get Gypped.
>A slave is worth 3/5 of a normal person.
There is a reason the pen is considered mightier than the sword.
A blade kills an enemy while it's wielder is alive, fit, and wielding it in anger.
The pen shapes the very thinking of entire generations. Anyone who says the space of violence is disjunct from the space of words is a downright fool. Hell, politics is just violence in it's Sunday/Friday/Saturday best.
As individuals, most of us are not that impressive, or as you say, we are downright pathetic. But our power is in our societal organization, and our inherited culture.
I don't know what you mean by responsibility here. In the current system fisherman are incentivized to catch fish by the profit* from selling them, which they pay taxes on. You need incentives because picking people and forcing them to be responsible for fishing would be slavery
"profit" is a different incentive than divine revelation although both have worked in human history.
The idea that, for example, any person claiming sole ownership/usufruct of a piece of land owes to the public a rent for the value of the undeveloped land is called Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism).
If I had to pick a "best-of" reading list, I'd say the 9th-century "Musica Enchiriadis", Berno's "Prologus in Tonarum", and Boethius's "De Institutione Musica". These all assume a familiarity with Platonic music theory, so at least skim through Plato's "Timaeus" first. There will also be more references to astronomy than will make sense to somebody in the modern age, because music and astronomy were believed to be essentially the same thing. Also more recent research has found that actual musicians of the time seem to have completely ignored the theorists. Some things never change.
In the 18th Century Presbyterian Church, they only sang Biblical psalms set to simple (but distinct) tunes and without any musical accompaniment. This was known as exclusive psalmody.
The psalms weren't the prose-style you'll find in any print Bible though, they were their own translation called the Metrical Psalms. Its 1650 edition proved very long lasting.
Many of these psalms were set to common metre, meaning that if you found such a psalter and tried singing it to some well-known tune it will very likely 'fit' the lyrics. You could try Psalm 23 set to the tune of The British Grenadiers, or Amazing Grace, or even The Star-Spangled Banner: https://thewestminsterstandard.org/psalm-23/
This was actually how the psalms were practised by congregations in my home country. The psalm lyrics were considered too sacred for practice, so they set the same tunes to other (sometimes comical) lyrics and practised those during the week. Then on Sunday the minister would say something like 'we will now sing Psalm xx to the tune of lilies', and the congregation would know the tune even if they hadn't memorised the psalm lyrics.
The closest mention I can find is this [1]:
> Early monastic rules say little about how time was determined, though the Rule of the Master notes that pairs of monks took turns, in weekly shifts, trying to stay awake while the others slept in order to awaken the abbot on time. Several possibilities for deter- mining that time are likely, however, including the use of calibrated candles or lamps of oil, [...] the recitation of a certain number of psalms, [etc]
However, here is it only mentioned as a possibility, not an actuality, and no sources are provided.
There appear to have been several orders who practiced 24-hour prayer by taking shifts, see for example the Acoemetae [2]. Here we do have Monks staying up all night reciting psalms but I can't find any indication that the prayers themselves were used to keep track of time.
The only reference to prayer-as-timekeeping that I can find seems to be in Medieval recipe books [3], which apparently would say things like boil this fish for as long as it takes to recite the lords prayer three times. Dead-reckoning works well on such short time-scales!
Even as early as the 500s there appear to have been timekeeping methods accurate enough to tell that dawn was approaching. When the skies are clear you can read this from the stars and accurate-enough water clocks have been in Europe since ~ the 500s. So there doesn't seem to be a need to perfect the act of spending hours reciting psalms at the right tempo.
[1]: https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/M_Helms_Before_2004.pdf [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoemetae [3]: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2017/08/cooking-on-pra...
But using the defence that a melody is public domain surely also invalidates your own copyright?
Plus, I assume that major studios have already been using stastical-based software for decades to help craft songs to fit the current vogue. There's a reason why many songwriters and producers write songs for Kpop and state those songs could never be released in the U.S.
I worked in the business for 15+ years and was involved in a lot of campaigns for artists and music you’ve heard a lot.
Everyone says this but once you get in the actual music business you end up seeing the vast amount of stuff that gets the exact same amount of marketing, checks all the boxes, has all the right people and money behind it, and goes absolutely fucking nowhere.
You realize very quickly it’s not really about the marketing. People get to decide what music they like, and do.
That doesn’t mean bad music doesn’t get popular. It does. You just don’t like the taste of the massive number of people that enjoy it.
I get it I can’t fucking explain Pitbull either. I want it to be a conspiracy.
What percentage of non-marketed artists hit it big? If equal to the marketed artists, why spend the money marketing?
1. Product gotta be good enough to compete with other similar products 2. Price low-price, middle or premium, but it needs to fit the category 3. Place make it easy to find and purchase 4. Promotion tell the people who need this thing, all about it
If any of these are wrong you don't get market success.
But there are a lot of non-linearities. Old Marketing joke: "I know half of my budget is not working, I just don't know which half"
I am not convinced. And it isn't about a conspiracy. These are sort of emergent phenomena and statistics. It doesn't mean every single pop song marketed in the same way will be a success. But I guarantee that there is correlation between major studios and their marketing and the average success of their songs. There's also other aspects such as paid advertising occurring in a song's lyrics and music videos, and this happens in movies as well. See: https://www.mic.com/articles/118974/pop-music-is-more-about-.... And that was several years ago. I imagine that's even worse these days. It certainly is for movies, but I don't listen to enough popular music to know.
A lot of this is about catching waves of sentiment and taste. The same thing happens in other industries, like fashion or furniture. For example, right now, you'll find a lot of furniture items coming in this sort of dusty rose pink. It feels like it came out of nowhere. So there's a snowball effect to how tastes change but then who can ride that and market towards where it's headed. I think that is as much as a part of a song's success than it's songwriting. Then there's a self-sustaining aspect of it, like that found in Max Martin's work. He's the goto guy, so artists go to him, so then people listen to his music, and then he remains the goto guy. His main talent, more so than his songwriting and production skills, is his ability to ride these waves of sentiment I mentioned. Couple that with the self-sustaining aspect, and you get his career.
I have watched several interviews of Kpop producers, many of which are western. They explicitly state that the songs they sell to the Kpop industry would not get bought and marketed in the U.S. by studios and artists. Yet, there are plenty of people who love Kpop music, and when people are introduced to it, they love it. So I believe those songs could be liked in the U.S. by western artists, but they aren't marketed.
It takes a lot of work to find good music that you like, and it almost never is on the figurative radio.
Some deep concepts right there. Would the same thing apply to any sequence of things? The AACS cryptographic key? The words in a book? Is there some breakpoint in number of permutations where human creativity and memorable history allow for copyright?
It's like interpreting Shakespeare. You can emphasis this sentence over that one, and this word over that one. It is still Shakespeare.
In short copying from the public domain does not make one's whole work public domain.
This maybe helps against specious claims?
It may be useful to consider how Pantone's copyright on shades of colour relates; they don't get to sue people for using those colours (in general).
The notes C-D#-G-D are a totally different melody with each note varied between 32nd and whole note, with rests between them, and using triplets.
I don't disagree with the point; independent constriction and collision are inevitable. But the math underestimates the space.
There are also a number of things that change the expression but not the melody. eg Hallelujah vs Zombie:
- have different melodies but use the same chords
- can be sliced and diced both with various rests and palm mutes and arpeggios and strumming yet still have them individually identifiable (and sometimes very close, possibly even overlapping in some sections, but that's perfectly normal and how one does a good mashup)
Even the time signature doesn't mean much, one could play Zombie on a blues shuffle and it would still be distinctively Zombie-esque.
Throw in music theory and keys and I IV V and chords and whatnot which I still don't master but I get the idea, it severely reduces what one ought to do to compose something enjoyable.
With that you can mathematically reduce you problem space to some extent.
In any case it's all completely moot because fundamentally the creation process is a) ingest ideas, b) digest, c) excrete ideas, which ultimately come from a mixture of a). Everything new looks like something else to some extent, and there's a fundamental reason why artists are told (or themselves tell) they're "influenced by" this or that other artist.
If we were to truly strictly enforce copyright nothing would ever get created anymore. So I don't know if copyright itself is right or wrong, but I feel copyright enforcement is truly fucked up these days (and not just in music)
As a beginner composing in my living room I'm truly scared (on top of fear of inadequacy) to push something out there I put my heart and soul into and get sued to oblivion (or at the very least have it destroyed and claimed by some entity that is not even involved in creation)
Perhaps OP meant to include a time period, like 100,000 tracks per month or something?
So they generated all of them, as MIDI sequences, and stored them on a hard drive.[1][2] Arguably, all those are now public domain
* Artists are generally inspired by other artists and societal context.
* Most artists make very little, some become fabulously wealthy.
* Artists with few resources must be extremely careful not to "infringe" the copyright of a powerful artist.
* Powerful artists have access to legal resources that allow them to, intentionally or unintentionally, take from smaller artists without facing similar repercussions.
There is a complete failure of the system to acknowledge that people produce similar works independently or that human progress has often been driven by conscious or subconscious inspiration.
The current regime would have us paying royalties to the dynasty of the guy that came up with the wheel. I don't think there's any justification that we'd be better off as a society if that were the case.
Music is born free and lives by sharing, but the Musical-Industry Complex thrives by other rules.
Obviously anyone who has sold the rights to their music gives up that particular claim that though.
And (in my opinion) the rights of any musician should die with them, so if they haven't sold the rights to their music while they're alive their music can't fall into the hands of a private equity company.
I.e. musicians should be able to pass on their assets like anyone else.
Creating rat’s nests of laws to fix things in ways that are not thoughtfully deep and wide only further separates the rights of the rich, who can afford legal strategists to dodge narrow scope laws, from everyone else.
What is needed are judicial judgements that uphold sensible outcomes, and provide relief (and deterrence) against frivolous speculative litigation.
The need for an open system of informed human judgement, to settle fuzzy boundaries based on relevant particulars, is one of the primary purposes of a judicial systems.
Micromanaging laws introduce massive opportunities for gaming and unintended harm. And create parasitic constituencies that become devoted to maintaining Byzantine situations.
I didn't suggest otherwise. I'm saying that musicians can't sell their rights and also claim it's bad that people who buy rights sue artists.
We shouldn't make an exception for musicians. We should relax intellectual property law everywhere.
Obligatory: "Good artists copy, Great artists steal!" (attributed to Picasso and Steve Jobs)
Even worse than that. They want us to pay royalties to the person who has a piece of paper saying they own the idea of a wheel.
The idea that society has raised multiple generations of people who weren't even alive contemporaneously with the author doesn't sit well personally.
It sucks and it is another stifling of culture. Literally nobody cares to do anything about it.
Whereas Marvin Gaye's heirs' successful litigation against Blurred Lines is very concerning (see: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2018/07/blurred-lines-b... ), although as has long been the case with copyright litigation in the USA - it really all depends on the jury !
Personally, when I listen to Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" right next to "Blurred Lines" I really cannot comprehend the jury's result. I guess they both employ a cowbell very prominently? But I wasn't a member of the jury, so it wasn't up to me. I find the Katy Perry result to be at least a little bit of a close call based on my own listening.
Song writers backed by huge companies are doing fine, but what about independent producers?
Lil Nas X was completely independent when he created Old Town Road with a complete copy & paste of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's music. So even in cases of absurdly blatant copyright infringement the artist might still do okay !
But Old Town Road is obviously commercial. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross currently receive a significant portion of the royalties (more than Lil Nas X!).
Do you have any source on this? Reznor has stayed mostly quiet about Old Town Road aside from mentioning it was strange at first but he doesn't really mind it. They worked out a deal but I don't think the terms were ever made public. Could he have demanded a large share of the royalties? Sure. But do you have proof he did?
https://variety.com/2020/music/news/old-town-road-recorded-f...
There's also a comment on Reddit that sounds pretty believable (Reznor: 37.5, Ross: 12.5, Lil Nas X: 21.25, YoungKio: 21.25, Billy Ray Cyrus: 3.75%, Jozzy: 3.75%). https://www.reddit.com/r/musicindustry/comments/bu3gd1/comme...
If Aphex Twin copyright-claimed the song that would be another thing. But this is like if someone else sampled Ghosts 34 and Lil Nas X claimed original copyright ownership of the sample.
Until 2019, 100% of the royalties for the song "Bitter Sweet Symphony" by The Verve, released in 1997 and their most recognizable song, went to the Rolling Stones. The Verve sampled the distinctive repeating string theme in that song from the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time", released in 1965. The Verve even got permission to use the riff from the 'Stones record label prior to releasing "Bitter Sweet Symphony."
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/23/726227555/not-bitter-just-swe...
Are you aware of any specific instances?
Not share earnings, not demonitize, straight to strike.
No, that’s actually a specific carve-out in US copyright law dating back to the Copyright Act of 1909.
It’s certainly a nice thing to do (like weird al and parodies), but it’s not required, and it’s completely useless for a budding singer to “ask permission” to do a cover from a popular artist or group, the request will go straight to the bin unread.
> That's kind of their choice?
Of course it is, but a copyright strike is a heavy handed and damaging choice. The Eagles are apparently notorious for this behaviour.
Keep in mind that a mechanical license wouldn't cover you on YouTube anyway - once you're making a video for your cover you now need a sync license which you do need permission for.
From the last instance I’ve seen that wasn’t even an option, the video was struck down and that was it.
Granted that was a cover not just a small bit of cover inside a longer video, but the cover-er specifically noted the Eagles opted to neither revenue-share (which was the cover’s state as it’d been properly content-id’d as a cover) nor demonetise, just take down the video entirely.
He also cites Rick Beato as having repeatedly had analysis of Eagles songs taken down.
Though maybe it’s because YouTube only has revenue sharing, you can’t send 100% revenue to the eagles?
Once (at least!) burned, forever shy. And they're not wrong: what YouTube does is also exploitative. Anybody on YouTube who's building a career on publicising the reprocessing of other people's music in any way, is building on sand. In no way are they any better off than the Eagles were under their original contracts.
Leaving the question, is it better to do react videos on Creedence because the owners aren't issuing copyright strikes, when you know that Creedence was robbed?
NOTE: This was explained to me by a musician/producer. I don't have firsthand knowledge of the system.
Not precisely (or at least not in this instance), from TFA:
> The claim over Thinking Out Loud was originally lodged in 2018, not by Gaye’s family but by investment banker David Pullman and a company called Structured Asset Sales, which has acquired a portion of the estate of Let’s Get It On co-writer Ed Townsend.
[0] personal opinion but still
Sheeran's claim to the court he was going to quit music stuck me as beside the point - I hope the jury didn't hear that, lest it influence their verdict. The question for them was if there was infringement. There obviously wasn't.
This meritless lawsuit was always going to fail. But Sheeran was fortunate to have deep pockets. He can afford to defend meritless lawsuits. The bigger issue is how to deal with large companies suing independent artists, and the consequences they should suffer for instituting meritless lawsuits.
Sportify, for example, is paying ~$0.003 / steam.
So this problem only happens to rich musicians who have earned a lot of money making music. That doesn't make it right, or reasonable, obviously. But it also means that the vast majority of musicians will never have this problem. The whole "copyright is threatening music" headline is a little overblown. "Rich douchebags are using copyright to bully rich musicians with meritless court cases" would probably be more accurate.
This is a vacuous observation. Any two songs are similar "in some ways".
> even Sheeran played them as a live medley
I think that says more about Sheeran's skill as a performer than it does about the similarity of the songs.
(this is not to say it's an infringement; they're just very similar.)
waiting. this sounds interesting.
For the record: I don't think it's infringement.
In fact, there is almost certainly a song (probably more than one) released before LGIO that you could map LGIO onto which LGIO would infringe by this standard.
LGIO doesn't fit a pattern of "unknown artist writes something, sues the big artist only when he/she has a hit." LGIO was a big hit on its own.
Led Zeppelin settled this one, for an undisclosed sum.
https://www.aaronkrerowicz.com/pop-music-blog/inspiration-or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXf7mMal5vY
Plagiarism is clearly a judgment call. I don't know if Townsend was willing to settle for a reasonable sum or not. Probably not, since they went to trial, which was just asking to end up with nothing.
Are we arguing? I think we're mostly in agreement about the main issue.
The only thing I think we might disagree on is that you attach more significance to the fact that LGIO and TOL sound coherent when you alternate between them than I do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1YxFjQXbXg
I'm not an expert on copyright law, but I think "derivative work" probably does describe TOL. However:
I believe the defendant is entitled to ask for a jury trial. Once that was granted, though, the plaintiffs should have settled. There's no way a jury is going to understand what a derivative work is, and a jury trial is horrendously expensive.
I don't understand why you think that's relevant. No one disputes that the songs share a chord progression (modulo a key change), and so they make a good mashup. There is a lot of daylight between that and copyright infringement (or at least there ought to be IMHO).
> I think "derivative work" probably does describe TOL.
We'll have to agree to disagree about that too. IMHO four chords is not enough, not even remotely close. If it were, you could easily enumerate all possible distinct songs.
Heck, there are far fewer chords than there are English words, so there are far fewer four-chord progressions than there are four-word phrases. Do you think it should be possible to copyright four words?
That said:
Your example is a straw man. "No one disputes that the songs share a chord progression" -- no, that's not the argument. Look at that video: they share identical four opening bars.
The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work.
Consider "fan fiction." You take the same Star Trek NG characters and change some of the plot. It's still recognizably Star Trek NG. Yet people do get away with fan fiction these days, AFAIK.
So a judge trial would have ended differently; the judge would have ordered a small but significant payment. But going for a jury trial was a loser right from the start.
They are not even close to identical. They share openings that can be made to sound identical if you just play the sheet music with a few tweaks (like changing key) but if you listen to the actual recordings no one would have any trouble telling them apart. In fact, I'll bet if you played the opening bars of the actual recordings to someone who was not trained in music it would not even occur to them that they were similar in any way.
We could do an experiment: I'll bet I could find five songs that are similar enough to LGIO that if you played the original recordings of those songs along with TOL and LGIO to test subjects who had not heard any of those songs before, that they could not pick out TOL and LGIO as the allegedly infringing pair with odds better than chance.
> The question is, did he start with LGIO and make mods to it? If so, it's a derivative work.
Yes, but that's irrelevant. An infringing work is an infringing work no matter how it was produced. Of course, the most likely way that an infringing work gets produced is by copying, but this is exactly the problem: the more you allow people to claim copyright over things with little information content (like a chord progression containing only three chords), and the broader a net you allow it to cast, the more likely it becomes that someone produces an infringing work by pure chance.
> people do get away with fan fiction these days
Only if they don't make money off of it.
> a judge trial would have ended differently
There is no way to know. But if you're right, then thank God for juries because sometimes that is our last bastion of defense against corporate overreach.
> if you listen to the actual recording
that's irrelevant to song copying. It's the sheet music and the lyrics that matter.
https://www.copyright.gov/engage/musicians/
There are two different kinds of music copyright, and the sheet music only matters for one of them.
But that shouldn't even be close to enough to be infringement. I'm one to think they got Satriani/Coldplay wrong as well, though. There are just too many examples of songs that make really good mash-ups. 4 Non Blondes What's Going On and Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry Be Happy, for instance. I'd say those are more similar that Sheeran/Gaye.
The examples I've found of that sound absolutely awful.
The mash up of Destiny's Child and Nirvana is far superior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXGSBpMHcpA
It's so good the original Bootylicious sounds dull and lifeless in comparison.
However, wouldn't this mean Creaky Boards actually stole the song from Satriani?
A few years ago Pomplamoose was really into mashups, and sometimes I had to remind myself these were two different songs. I just checked their channel, and their two most popular pieces are mashups (Sweet Dreams + Seven Nation Army, and Stayin’ Alive + Virtual Insanity)
I really believe that Jamaica saw such a musical explosion (and continued cultural dominance) because of the "human" view of music creation. So much was about borrowing or reusing or repurposing. Lyrics subtly changed from other songs. Reusing melodies from other songs. Purposely having multiple artists do their take on "riddims" to make the song their own. It let anyone contribute and it increased the amount of creative production, not reduced it. And, what do we get out of subtle modifications and copying of previous tunes? A genre.
> similar enough that even Sheeran played them as a live medley
That doesn't really mean much, any good sounding diatonic (chords all from the same key) song is going to share the progression with lots of other songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I
And many other types of music.
But whether you "can" or "can't" copyright something doesn't really come in to play: I can sue anyone for anything, and as long as it's vaguely plausible so it won't get thrown out and my pockets are deep enough I can be a serious nuisance. Whether the claim is ridiculous or not is actually not all that important.
Basically the same way software patents work: you don’t have to worry about suing yourself, and MAD ensures you won’t get sued by any of the other big players. The next logical step is the rise of the nothing-to-lose patent/copyright troll. Get rights to some obscure piece, then start extracting payments
Last time this was on the front page we were a few who posted different medleys.
I’ll repost my favorite, pachhelbels rant: https://youtu.be/uxC1fPE1QEE
“ A quirk of the law restricts which aspects of “Let’s Get It On” (1973) are under copyright. For many songs made before 1978, only the contents of the sheet music submitted to the Copyright Office (known as the “deposit copy”) are protected. With “Let’s Get It On,” that notation was skeletal: just chords, lyrics and a vocal melody. Other key aspects of the track, like its bass line and signature opening guitar riff, were absent. That means the lawsuit primarily came down to the chord progressions of the two songs, which are nearly — but not entirely — identical.”
https://www.nytimes.com/article/ed-sheeran-marvin-gaye-copyr...
This is a bit frustrating because Neely did a better job covering the "Blurred Lines" case but Beato has more viewers, I guess.
We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul. There is no doubt, one will be better than the other.
Admittedly this is from a book that explicitly recommends ripping off other songs as the basis for your own short-lived masterpiece.
The king, in an attempt to find this well, issues a proclamation, that whoever finds this place to drill will own all of the water that comes out of it for the rest of their lives.
Most of the desert dwellers recognize that searching for this well wont keep them fed in the meantime, so an enterprising young duke offers a different deal. He says that he will pay people to search for the well, in exchange for the rights to the water if they find it.
Many desert dwellers take him up on this deal, its a good job, and it pays well enough to subsidize the searching.
When the well is finally found, the king grudgingly hands the duke the rights to the water, and with the wealth that the exorbitant prices he charges for water brings him, the duke eventually owns the whole desert and deposes the king.
That's it, thats the whole story. If you thought it was stupid, and that the king should have done things differently, we are in agreement.
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It doesn't say a transferable right. and "securing" and "exclusive" seem to argue against transferability. Beats me why the courts and congress decided otherwise.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I find very sad the fact that pop songs have become nothing more than 4 chords just repeating over and over, with a thin veneer of inconsequential melody over them, serving a never ending stream of banal lyrics. Is this really the best of what award-winning musicians like Sheeran et al can do? I mean, they don't even bother changing the harmony for the chorus, and where has the bridge gone?
And I don't really see what is there to be bored with - it's just music. You put a POP playlist on Spotify or whatever and it's enjoyable music that you can have on for 8 hours while you work. If you want stuff that deviates from it, there's plenty to choose from - but I don't understand why anyone is surprised that this isn't what most people listen to.
These days, there's really no good part, at least not pushed by the big music labels. There is some great stuff outside the US, or from independent artists, etc.
Gosh, that was easy to refute. ; )
Not necessarily trying to be flip, just underlining that it's not reasonable to talk about matters of taste in the way that you are.
And of course many of those singers are technically talented anyway.
Kind of just sounds like you're being an asshole.
The reason for this is partly the liberation of production. Anyone with a laptop can produce a track that rockets in popularity. There's plenty of really interesting pop too like The Weeknd.
There has also been a shift in the purpose of music for young people. Putting aside the use of music in things like TikTok, young people have zeroed in on simplicity to communicate an emotion. Music is more ambient, designed to provide something that resonates emotionally but isn't intrusive. Almost a self-medication with music.
This is, I think, because music became more portable. If you can have music on for 8 of 12 hours in the day, are you going to be sat doing critical listening to classical or 1970s prog? No, you're going to put on a background vibe that makes you feel good.
It is easy to be cynical about the commercialisation of music, but there's no black or white, the reality is more nuanced and there's innovation going on not only with the sounds and production ... but also what music means.
Ignore young people at your peril, or you'll be an old cummudgeon who only listens to Pink Floyd or whatever and misses out on so much.
On a sidenote, we see it on the web, you can argue that most marketing websites look the same, it follows a formula that sells.
If modern pop doesn't seem to focus on melody or harmony, it's interesting what it focuses on instead. It doesn't seem to be rhythm or form either. It might be the timbres of sounds (interesting singing voice, unique singing manerisms, or difference between clean or dirty bass, etc.), trying to create a unique listening experience on common speakers. There's a reason why physical instruments are used ever less in pop while use of human voice is ever more in the focus.
It might also not be the music at all but instead the lifestyle and drama surrounding the artists. In that case, all I have to say is that there's more than pop and there has never been more amazing music in all styles you can imagine being produced. It also has never been easier to find and access. If you're not listening to it yet, you probably don't care that much about harmony, melody and whatnot.
Who cares if it's "pop"? Listen to what you like.
I've checked her out out of curiosity. Sounds like a French copycat of Llana Del Ray.
An example of fact exhaustion is canons. They've been done a while, but there's been a lot of music made since when.
There's infinitely more variety that just Bach's counterpoint people - it was just a (really fantastic) style
MG is all about the samples and the breakbeats. Definitely not the chords, haha. But I do wonder how that factors in to mixing.
You can orchestrate almost any progression to be pleasing or interesting - as there's far more to harmony than just choosing what chords go in what order
Chord voicings and the arrangement of the composition have far more of an impact on the final piece than just the ordering of chords
It's also very culturally relative - Classical North Indian harmony would sound awful (IMO) if you used more than one chord (in their case a Shruti box drone) under the piece
In a similar way, Jazz Musicians would insist the ii-V-I progression is the most useful of all time, not I-V-vi-IV like most pop/rock listeners
It's all relative to context and I-V-vi-IV is not as "universal" as all those magazine articles and blog posts will insist
Don't let the theory of harmony proposed by Bach and his dead German associates be the be all and end all of harmony
Some progressions are more popular than others (think of it like Sloane's Gap in mathematics), but there's certainly no teleology in music or its progressions!
The assumptions you make are incorrect. And even if they were, your conclusion is also incorrect.
Copyright does not require "pleasing". Only that the work have a minimum of human creativity. And courts have rules that is very minimal. Arranging otherwise uncopyrightabable facts can be enough.
Copyrighted works don't have to be unique, but it'll be real hard to prove independent invention.
Notably Sheeran didn't say anything against copyright - just that this particular claim shouldn't have come to court.
I think most musicians would agree with that, but it's hard to lay that on copyright law exactly - at most it would be a tweak to make it harder to bring action for "sound-alike" songs.
Interestingly any change like that would probably make it harder for artists to bring action against AI-written works that sound like theirs.
Patent trolls, overly broad and vague patents that stifle innovation and prevent competition. Amazon should never have got a patent on 1-Click purchases and hardware shouldn’t be impossible to enter due to entrenched players’ deep patent portfolios.
Overextending trademark, look up all the ways Monster Beverages tries to abuse their “Monster” trademark, just as one example.
Copyright is used to stifle innovation in the arts as seen here. It keeps works out of the public domain for way too long as well.
Not only do these directly cause harm but they create chilling effects due to how they let the legal system be weaponized in their defense. Even if I would win a lawsuit regarding whether I’m allowed to do something, I might still let a big player bully me out of it because of the risk and asymmetric cost of going to court. This generates a huge amount of friction.
Without our current IP system you would not have all these abusive middle men in publishing, music, or other media. Not only are they stifling new art, they’re benefitting from IP by using it take a huge cut directly from artists per their contracts.
Trade secrets, allowing for reverse engineering but not direct espionage, are IMO the only kind of IP that we should allow as-is. Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.
https://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/12x4361/alice_fa...
The suggestion that HN is somehow representative of "engineers" in general is just not true. While HN includes many people with all sorts of opinions, the average is quite biased, especially on topics like this.
I think it's true that patent lawyers don't give a shit what HNers think, but I don't think that stuff posted to reddit is a good benchmark either
Not making a flattering statement about Trump here, just that _he_ wasn't _the problem_, in this and other things.
That said, "jk guys actually you can forget about what we said" would be fantastic for this and many other things our government has made part of its international doctrine, and might be a thing it would even do if our government had any interest in governing for our benefit rather than for a tiny minority.
the system allows all kinds of abuse, but it also greatly benefits anybody who makes their living through intellectual property, at the expense of all the rest of us. this specific time it hurts Ed Sheeran, but it's also made him a lot of money. and we all care about it this time because it affects somebody famous enough for us to care, but all those "chilling effects" already exist and art and creativity is stifled every day to protect the rich and famous (and their heirs)
The whole "X is bad, so let's reinvent it from scratch" doesn't have a great track record. An obvious example is the way the cryptocurrency space has spent the last 15-years speed-running the discovery of why a financial regulatory system is in fact valuable. And as Mike Masnick pointed out, we see it over and over in the social media space. [1] Or we might look at the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Obviously, we should look at the way the current IP system is being misused or is suboptimal and improve it. But trying to rebuild it from scratch could end up worse even if every current bad actor wouldn't be vigorously lobbying to make abuse easier in the new version. And they certainly would.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...
Also, the current IP system is in a way a form of protectionism that benefits mostly Western companies (at the expense of mostly western consumers). Piecemeal iteration towards allowing more profits to be captured by developing countries vs American companies… you’d need to make a bigger change that clearly benefits western consumers more than it harms them.
I’m not saying we need a communist revolution lol, but I do think we need to start by reasoning from the fundamental outcomes we want to incentivize and consider how a replacement system incentivizes those vs undesirable outcomes. For example, I think approximately no author (yes I know this applies to a couple of Tolkien’s pieces) is factoring in whether their IP lasts 25 years vs 75 years into their decision to write something. And I think it’s safe to say that patents, in at least most domains I’m familiar with, do much more to stifle actual entrepreneurship than to incentivize it.
Another potential reason a replacement would be less abusable is that, if the replacement does away with IP middlemen (patent trolls, record labels making huge profits off what are effectively payday loans to artists, conglomerates like Disney acquiring as much IP in some domains as they can) we could avoid the situation where extractive elements lobby for increasingly more extractive laws or policies or throw their weight around in a way to create unfair outcomes.
I’d like to add our current system is something we’ve progressively iterated towards through centuries of common law (originating from before the Industrial Revolution and even such radical concepts as “widespread literacy” or “less than 90% of people being farmers”). It has accumulated cruft and crap and comes from a time where creative work was proportionately a less important part of the economy, and is a product of centuries of influence from incumbents seeking regulatory capture. Just weakening those incumbents and giving them less of a snowball to roll down the hill would lessen abuse for the time being.
I feel like this was clear to most people, which is why Crypto never really took off other than as an investment vehicle.
Copy Right : Automatic, limit to 20 years. For more than 20 years each YEAR a tax of 2^(years of copyright, starting at 21) dollars PLUS 2^(Cyears - 20)% sales. Thus for year 21 this would be ~2million + 2% of sales. Year 25 would be ~33.5 million + 32% of sales. Year 26 would be 64% of sales, and year 27+ would be pointless.
Trade Mark : Unlimited number of years, BUT, must be filed every year. Some sort of small filing fee per mark (more costly than the government processing, this is also to protect name-space pollution) plus 1% (* edit: n%) of sales on any TMed product.
EDIT: * The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.
Character and Likeness things would all file under the consumer protection of Trade Mark.
Patents do not exist anymore, in the modern age no patent describes the 'useful art' in a way that is useful to anyone practicing that art in the scientific / applied engineering fields who should benefit from it, so it is unconstitutional by definition.
Discuss and adjust the copyright duration and post-free copyright numbers according to real incentive (IMO even 20 years is too long and should be ramped down to more like a decade, but the 'back end' of exponential fee increase should be stretched out to around 30 years total). Ah also, REGISTRATION of the copyright should lead to triple (actual) damages for infringement. Registration would also include filing with the National Library and an association of libraries, an archive copy of the work with is unencumbered by copyright and free of any 'DRM' or other 'protection mechanisms'; to be 'unsealed' after it becomes public domain.
I don’t think trademarks need to be taxed like that, basically every single consumer product has a trademark and I’m positive you could work around the nested trademark thing. I think trademarks are good to disincentivize fraud or misleading consumers (you shouldn’t be able to infringe <highly trusted brand> with low quality crap), the problem is the legal system allows frivolous application of trademark, like one company suing another for using the same common word (eg Monster) in a tangentially related domain, or another company trying to enforce trademark of something that shouldn’t even be in scope of trademark, like a color.
Especially for trademark I think we need to prevent its weaponization for anticompetitive/extractive purposes, more than we need to restrict or disincentivize its legitimate use. That probably requires some really clever lawyers with expertise moreso than HN comments
* Corporations / Individuals, should pay more _per mark_ when they file for more marks. Again, I don't even have a good idea of an initial proposal for the fee, just a good reason for wanting that. The more brands, characters (names attached to types of likenesses) and products locked up the less space there is for competition and innovation. Also, again, this isn't supposed to start out as a huge cost, it should be reasonable for an individual to have a trademark or two on something they're trying to create as a brand. Maybe smaller groups (including of 1 / individual) could have a lower registration fee on their first N terms. However this also needs to be balanced against effects we currently see with patent trolls. Human review (with a HIGH bar for pass!) and a requirement for a real product that consumers can purchase should be hard requirements.
* The additional tax per product should just be a flat n%, maybe even less than 1%. The administrative overhead of having different tax rates outweighs any benefits with my initial thoughts of a cap at 2%.
The way trademarks are supposed to work is that your “Monster Energy” trademark applies within the domain, so you can block “Super Monster Soda” but have no case against “Fetish Monsters Diaper Playpack”. Similarly I think it’s fair that a big concrete, skinny clown holding a hamburger at a burger shop (with a big yellow capital M sign, selling Big Macs and McFlurries) across the street from an actual McDonalds would be penalized as trademark infringement without McDonald’s having to pay billions a year in trademark costs.
What we need to disincentivize and prevent is this: https://thehustle.co/monster-energy-thinks-it-owns-the-word-...
Patents and copyrights are so important that they are part of the US Constitution. I'm one that believes that they are a must for a working economy that produces products that we need. There are countless of products that would not exist if we did not have them. Many of the pharmaceuticals that require billions of dollars would not be available without IP protection. I would even question the whole music business and its many unique songs that are only produce with the hope that they become hits and the money that comes with it that lets artists support themselves.
The problem is not Copyrights and Patents but the way businesses have captured the implementation of the laws around them. That's where the reform should happen. A company should not have the power to rewrite IP laws to favor themselves.
There probably weren't that many other e-commerce outfits at the time with a customer base made up of frequent/repeat buyers (to a degree that would motivate the designers to opt for it). The first store to put a big red sign with its name above its entrance shouldn't necessarily be granted the exclusive privilege of doing so for the next N years.
The modern, two wheeled with handle "tipper" style didn't come onto the market until 1987.
Someone was absolutely going to figure out the implementation of 1-click ordering regardless of who patented it. That’s why software patents suck, they almost always take the form of “apply technology X to domain Y in a really basic way” which would be invented hundreds of times independently even with no prior art - but whoever gets that patent gets to block or tax all those other independent inventions of the same pattern for years. I can’t speak as much to other industries but I’m confident it describes many many patents outside software. It’s not obvious in hindsight dude, it’s obvious that given a website where I’m buying things, a good UX for some cases is to just let me buy the thing in one click.
Hey I have a bunch of ideas for LLMs, should I get a patent for “a system for using a transformer model to find a message in a system’s logs” or “use a transformer model to identify a problem in an application” or “use a transformer model to produce output in the style of some human generated input”? Those are obvious given the invention of transformers, but software patents often take that exact structure “payment over a network” “use of a biometric signal to authenticate a banking transaction”.
I’m pretty sure you don’t even need to implement what you’re patenting to get the patent, just describe it well enough and hope nobody else implemented it or filed for it first. Which just incentivizes purely unproductive behavior of patenting “ideas” you expect will be independently arrived at many times in the near future so you can tax them. Or makes a market for so-called “inventors” to engage in this inefficient behavior so they can sell their “inventions” (accepted patents) to trolls or megacorps to do that (yes, this is what the people who file patents to tax others for a living call themselves).
> Everything else needs to be thrown out and potentially replaced with something else less abusable - I think Netflix should be allowed to fund a big movie and recoup the costs fairly without it being immediately ripped and given away for free, but they shouldn’t get to bully people making similar content or even content extending the IP.
You actually state almost the exact problem that's makes IP law so impossible to do at scale. Like it's easy to distinguish between similar content, extending content vs ripping content.
Pure ripping is easy, but step outside of that, when is it "similar vs ripping". When is it right to use a DCMA takedown? Is it because a song had a similar 4 note progression? is it 5 notes? is it "tonality" of those notes", the "interval", what makes it "recognizable"?
When is a patent the same as another? When is it different? Look at fasteners. There's an insane amount of patents for fasteners. Some are truly novel for very specific purposes I say it's a special fastener for vibrations in microgravity. Space fastener! Great, that's unique! Oh and it also works well in 1G. hrm.....
Once a patent is issued, how do you know who it belongs to? The person who made it, cool that's great. But let's say he doesn't have the ability to manufacture, so he sells the patent. Now you've got your proper buyers vs trolls.
It's easy to say "let's get rid of it!" and not consider the depth of the problem at hand.
> Pure ripping is easy
As in, that's easy to distinguish. But, take a single step away from image-for-image or byte-for-byte copy and it gets hard real fast.
That's where all the problem lies, right? That when is something not-a-direct-copy but still infringes-on-the-original?
And that's what I'm trying to highlight. My "space fastener" from earlier is unique because it does novel things (for arguments sake). But once I add "it works in 1G" well it's going up against a whole bunch of other nuts/bolts.
I'm hoping to help convince you that it's more than surface deep - is all.
That said, I can easily point to bad outcomes that need to be handled better (mostly related to abusing litigation of IP), and I also think we can do better than the current pattern of securitizing the commons with low payment back to the commons. We’re incentivizing much more than what we’re actually attempting to incentivize with our IP system.
I agree. But did you see that the loser in the Wagatha Christie lawsuit has now trademarked the term "Wagatha Christie", even though she didn't coin the phrase?
You get a trademark to prevent "passing off" - other people making a product like yours, and using your marque to deceive consumers. When you register a trademark, you specify what classes of products you are asking protection for. Have a look at the list of goods and services Vardy claims protection for:
https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00...
It lists hundreds of product categories that Vardy is never going to make or sell, where the risk of consumer confusion is zero.
This is kind of a personal hill I’m willing to die on because I’m pissed enough already that I was born into a world that only just recently - last 200y - either enclosed (land) or ruined (air, ocean) all the other commons in a way that benefits winners (and their descendants) while harming me. But I think that, fundamentally, securitizing creative work is an enclosure of the “commons” that benefits the securitizers a bit much at the expense of the commons, indeed it’s one of the last commons we have left where there’s enough space for the Average Joe but even that is at risk given increasingly strong IP protection and multinational corporations’ patent portfolios.
For one, things like chord progressions in music are of low enough dimensionality that they can easily be fully “enclosed” to clear harm to the public, as their being previously used or invented doesn’t mean derivative-seeming works are actually stealing the IP. For patents, we’re also “enclosing” common sense applications of new technology to domains because our patent office and legal system don’t know any better, and are even setup to facilitate this (see that Texas county that handles a huge portion of patent disputes).
I don’t know all the ways to fix it, I’d rely on the expertise of lawyers and specialists (like people in the EFF) to figure that out. I’m sure people have problems with things I have domain knowledge about despite not knowing exactly how to fix it; that doesn’t mean they’re illegitimate problems. But just like when people take issue with my bigtech stuff, there are a huge number of incumbent entrenched interests incentivized to fight against detrimental (to them) changes, and most experts knowledgeable enough to understand the problem and solutions are actively employed/benefitting from the current system setup. It’s just a hard problem.
Patents is a mess. You invent cool thing X, and patent it; you get 15 years or so of protection. After 14 years, you tweak invention X to make thing Y, and patent that.
Wait - that means you've got another 15 years added to the patent term of X! How does that work? You should only have protection for the Y tweak.
Copyright was supposed to protect "works", not fragments of melody. The Led Zeppelin/Spirit argument about Taurus/Stairway To Heaven is interesting; I'm a big Spirit fan, and the Stairway intro sure sounds a lot like Taurus to me. I believe it was a lift. But there's a lot more to Stairway than the intro; Taurus was on Spirit's rather obscure first album, and it wasn't a big hit. It wasn't hit material. The claim was obviously a money-grab by the heirs of Randy California's estate against one of the biggest rock hits of the 70s. Copyright shouldn't be inheritable; it should expire on the author's death.
This gets really murky when people start trading in copyrights and patents. I don't know why that's permitted; the rights should adhere strictly to the author/inventor. There should be no corporate copyright. I think the theory is that the author/inventor is often unable for financial reasons to defend their rights; but I don't see why that should be. If a claim has merit, it should be possible to find a practitioner who's willing to help you, in exchange for a share of the damages.
That'd create some strange incentives though – if it looks like the author might be dying (relatively) soon, people might opt to wait for a possibly premature expiration (both the author's and his/her copyrights) instead of paying to get access right now. In a particularly dystopic future, it might even create incentives to speed up an unfortunate author's demise just to get at the copyrights.
This is legal in general.
If I got into a legal battle with Disney or Nintendo it would go like this:
>You are probably going to lose
>If you do lose, you will be ruined
>If you don't lose, you will also be ruined
I don't have a solution except to avoid any ambiguity and let the big corporations sort that out among each other.
I honestly think the industry doesn't care, as long as the money flows. Like a lot of creative "jobs", there are 2 types of people who do them; those that can afford to and those that "have to" for whatever personal reasons.
The industry will continue to squeeze money out of both of them because the supply is essentially endless.
Blue might be free, but the same is not true for all colors, at least not all paints [0].
The space Ed Sheeran and most popular music "explores" is small. But that problem is not inherent to making music people like. Even if he were writing in today's environment, Stevie Wonder would never have to worry about an accidental collision.
>In the latest case, which just concluded last week, Sheeran said that if he lost he’d probably quit music altogether, as it’s just not worth it.
If you are able to "quit music", you aren't a musician. You're someone who figured out how to make sounds people like for money. It's just not something a musician can do.
He might not quit playing music as he's a musician, but he might quit the business, performing and putting out music for others to hear, if all that comes out of it is frivolous lawsuits.. Basically piranhas out for blood regardless of the harm they're causing.
If I had to spend half my time in court as a software engineer for using a for loop, it wouldn't make much sense for me to keep being one.
I suppose it was hyperbole to illustrate the importance of the case.
I'm glad he won the case as it seems so frivolous to me, but I wouldn't object to him quitting music nonetheless.
But I don’t really run into such coincidences regularly.
Maybe the difference is just that the artists that I listen to don’t have millions to be sued for.
Hugo winner, and if you haven't read it it's both highly relevant and a quick read.
OR
When for more worlds the Macedonian cried,
He wist not Thetis in her lap did hide
Another yet, a world reserved for you
To make more great than that he did subdue …
—“A Panegyric to My Lord Protector,” lines 73–6https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I&pp=ygUPYXhpcyBvZ...
"There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available."
But yeah, let's feel bad for the millionaire mediocre musician.
I don't know where to look any of this up. Can you just give us the data?
source: https://www.musicindustryhowto.com/ed-sheeran-net-worth/
alt source: https://edm.com/industry/spotify-highest-earning-artists
>look up what Ed makes on Spotify per play, vs what the average person would
How does Ed Sheeran make per play, and how does that compare to the $0.003 that (I assume) the average person makes?
Spotify spent a long time in negations to get that price, and I'm not aware of any credible claims they pay higher rates to popular artists (outside perhaps limited time launch promotions)
I think the more interesting question is how much Sheeran gets vs his record company, but that isn't a Spotify thing.
But I don't really know what the point of that is - sure maybe now he could go on his own and take it all, and coast for a while with existing fan base, no marketing or major concerts, etc. - but he presumably (at least at the time he last locked in to x years) thinks that's value for money.
^not actually on Spotify, sorry to disappoint!
https://artists.spotify.com/en/help/article/royalties
From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare.
We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder.
https://indepentia.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-st...
For example: if Billie Eilish receives 2% of all Spotify streams in a month, she will receive 2% of that month’s available streaming royalties.
So the more streams you do, the higher your streamshare, the higher your average pay per steam.
Yes it annoys the hell out of me that I support so many underground bands and realise that 60% of my subscription fee is probably going to pop artists.
Artist frequently complain that Spotify isn't paying them enough, but forgetting that the record companies take a very large chuck of the profits, just to act as an increasingly irrelevant middleman.
I think if you want to change the outcomes of the system, we should adjust the laws and incentives underlying the system.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Any argument towards my conclusion on copyright would be entirely philosophical but I see your point about trolling is effect not intent but I disagree with it it only stifles discussion and promotes echochamberism (in my humble opinion).
Now trolling with intent by all means ban those.
Sure, some IP protection I'd argue is needed, but they're always on the maximization side of it and they're unhappy it's being used against them? Oh well
The complaints about copyright law are to me atleast, not seeing the forest for the trees. It's much more concerning the conflicts of interest between the music labels and spotify - setting up a deal that essentially siphons off their artists's profits to themselves, than copyright law as it is today. If the market were structured such that the labels had a fiduciary responsibility to their signed artists this market would look very different.
> But the lawsuits have been where he’s really highlighted the absurdity of modern copyright law. After winning one of the lawsuits a year ago, he put out a heartfelt statement on how ridiculous the whole thing was. A key part: > > There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released every day on Spotify—that’s 22 million songs a year—and there’s only 12 notes that are available.
Too many technical artisans (and I'm using this term loosely, to include those who craft software, music, or any other physical / virtual good that requires some modicum of skill to produce) believe that the law regarding copyright applies to the sole right to sell a particular arrangement of whatever medium it is they are working in. This is the wrong thinking.
While it is true western music has twelve notes and some finite number of common chords, which can only be arranged in finite time in finite ways, this is irrelevant to copyright, because notes, like source code, like paint, like lyrics, etc also has Color, and if you don't understand what Color is (and think it's red, green and blue, and such), then I suggest you read https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23