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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

A single song is not a "collective work".

If anyone is tempted to start spinning the English meaning of the term "collected" to point out how in some sense a song is often a collection of a lot of other elements that may be further copyrighted, stop. The English meaning is not the relevant one, the legal meaning is. A single song is not, legally, a collected work, it is a single work.

If anyone is tempted to construct some exceptional song-like thing that is also a collected work, yes, very good, you've got your thesis topic for your copyright class all laid out, but it is an exception, not the rule.

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Curious, would this case be different if the song was a Mashup? I suspect so, right?

A mashup would be a derivative work of several original works, not a collection of works.

Also, for the record, that wasn't the question I was trying to forestall with my last paragraph. I was more after someone doing something bizarre like creating a multi-hour "song" where each "instrument" is a full other song loaded as one big sample or something. Generally speaking the answer to this sort of trickery is "You're a programmer, and you're using thought processes designed to slip things past computers. Judges are human." There are certainly ways to "slip things past" a human judge as well, but they are very different. Human judges generally react poorly to outright sophistry, where computers don't mind it one bit.

This whole thing sounds like the quantum mechanics of copyright since it doesn't fit with common sense.

If copying individual elements (all the chapter titles) of a work is fine, how is it that it is unacceptable to make an original song that contains a 5 second sample of a single instrument from another song? Both are copying a very small excerpt from a larger work.

Quantum mechanics is at its most mysterious when you haven't even taken the time to learn the basic terminology.

From my point of view, your question is odd because you've made up both parts of the if clause from whole cloth. Copying "individual elements" may or may not be fine, and five second samples are just plain irrelevant to the discussion being had.

Again, "collective work" is an important term here. It is not clear to me that you understand what that means, and generally trying to answer questions based on deep misconceptions gets nowhere fast. If you really care you're going to have to go pick up some basics from not-an-HN-comment.

I'm not sure how you got the idea that I was trying to argue about what copyright LAW says. I was simply making the case that, just as with quantum mechanics, nothing about copyright is based on common sense, so people need to be careful to be aware of this bias when they think about these issues, especially when a lot of people discussing this have moral / philosophical positions that confuse their view of the legal standing of the plaintiffs. "That doesn't seem right" is a question of legislation policy, not of interpreting existing law.

No, it makes more sense than you think. It's not total sense, but it makes more sense than you think. It's just that since you don't seem to know what the terms mean you're getting a greater sense of confusion than is justified, plus technical people just can't resist the lure of trying to create bizarre exceptions which don't help.

What constitutes a single work is basically what a person on the street would answer is a single thing. What constitutes a collective work is basically what a person on the street would call a collective work, after they answer the first question. (That is, if you start here they might say an album is one work, but if you get them to agree that a song is one thing once they probably won't say that.) What constitutes copying is basically what a person on the street would agree is copying. That certainly isn't good enough advice to go off of if you're going to try to build a business off of it or something, and edge cases abound, but the core concepts aren't anywhere near as screwed up as you might think. The problem isn't conceptual with copyright, it is how the concepts are used and abused.

A single song is an individual work. If you wanted to make a "Best of 80's" CD that would be a collected work. If someone copies a single song from your best-of CD, well, that's not really your problem because you don't own that song. If someone copies your whole CD, then you've got a case if you registered that particular collection.

The list of songs on CD isn't copyrightable -- it's a fact, not a creative expression. Taking a 5 second sample is most likely to be considered fair use.

I don't think any of this is too far off from common sense.

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