A Legal Loophole May Leave Some Rock Riffs Up for Grabs

I feel like the outcome of the case discussed here runs completely opposite to the outcome of the Marvin Gaye estate against Robin Thicke and the other writers on Blurred Lines, whereby the song, without any sort of similarity note-wise, was found to be infringing based on the "feeling" of the song, which seems incredibly problematic for anyone writing music nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blurred_Lines#Marvin_Gaye_laws...

It kinda hit me why Frank Zappa fanatically transcribed _all_ his music (at one point he had a young inter named Steve Vai do it); submit those despot copies to the copyright office. It's what the major labels did, and he was decidedly independent with a good helping of paranoia to boot.

By this logic, would Guitar Magazine, which published very complete sheet music for many of these songs have a copyright claim? I know I have a magazine at home with Stairway to Heaven and I'm pretty sure there's a copyright in there somewhere.

Sounds like a lot of pre '78 guitar/bass/horns/keys solos/intros are potentially non-copyrighted in the USA, because they were not transcribed into written musical notation.

You'd still probably need deep pockets at some stage to pay a legal weasel to defend you from another legal weasel suing on behalf of the estate of a dead or aged musician.

Apparently all jazz music is then not copyrighted before 1978.

Seems fair, they should require a reference copy of the deposit transcription for every takedown request.

I didn't know what a "riff" was and thought this was about some free rocky land that was up for grabs ...