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Comment by dwohnitmok | Hacker News Reader

I wonder at what point similarities with past works becomes inevitable. There's only a finite amount of original music out there, especially if you're talking about the length of an average riff or motif, leave out a lot of the more extreme attempts of contemporary art music, and stick to what sounds pleasing in popular music genres. And the output of number of musical compositions seems only to be increasing. An interesting short story in this vein is http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

A bit on the melodramatic side, but explores the same general point.

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Punk rock would be a minefield. And that's all only come out of the blues (skipping some historical points) which relies heavily on "standards".

So many of the compositions along that tract are made up of three to five notes in a limited variety of voicings and arrangements.

I - III - V - IV

Try Johnny Be Goode. Chuck Berry has his reputation but he could have pulled a move like this a large number of times by now [and somehow hasn't! (don't quote me on that, though)

I (4 Bars) - III (2 Bars) - I (2Bars) - V (2 Bars) - I (4 Bars)

Or something like that. But there's 90% of the song, repeated over.

Country music, three chords and the truth, has it worse.

Also from the blues! But [usually] in the pocket instead of syncopated.

But definitely. Especially modern pop country (gag) as even all the themes are the same! Red truck, light beer, America. Am I missing anything?

Anyway yeah—all the way back to Hank Williams you could form the basis of a case that any song that progresses Gmaj - Amaj - Dmaj on an acoustic guitar with a mournful vocal tone and downtrodden lyric content is a "rip off".

You forgot a 'guuurl' usually with a short skirt.

Chuck Berry had one of his songs plagiarized note for note though. Sweet little sixteen and Surfin USA are the same song

Obligatory Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song Exmple

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I

Haha! Thanks for this. Spot on.

To add to that, if you haven't seen it yet: https://youtu.be/YWUQg0bqhVw

Rob Paravonian's Pachebel Rant I think predates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

It is precisely because of this that there are thousands of songs based on the 'Amen Break':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break

By using it you can play safe and not be accused of accidental copying, even though copying is exactly what is being done by using the 'Amen Break'. Sing over the top of it and you are good to go, nobody can accuse you of being insufficiently creative.

As a consequence of this there are similarities between the thousands of songs using the 'Amen Break'. If you were a DJ you could play the longest set ever mixing them in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

Yup, Axis of Awesome's 4 Four Chord Song. First thing that came to my mind too.

Totally inevitable.

I was listening to a recent album and the opening/closing riff of one of the songs was identical to something I used to play in my room between studying 30 years ago.

I remember my own discovery process. I had been playing the acoustic part of "Welcome Home - Sanitarium" with it's two finger chords and was messing around with similar chords higher up the neck and found a few that sounded really cool. Did I copy that song? No, but definitely inspired, the other guys probably discovered the riff in a similar way - just noodling around until they heard something they liked.

> "I wonder at what point similarities with past works becomes inevitable."

This question gets at the crux of the problem; its answer depends entirely on "what are the atomic constituents of a musical work?"

With consensus around a legal catalog of sounds, you could use reasonable assumptions to estimate a year by which all musicians have a 99.999% chance of being dirty-dirty infringing criminals.

I worry about the future as I own a record label as well. I think the period that works go into public domain should be 10 years instead of the current 75... If you think about it, music releases usually make most of their money within the first 10 years of release, and then after that they may become classics, but then people who want to find the music generally seek the originals. Remixing can also make the original songs popular again, so labels need to really account for that before suing. 75 years ago most recording technology was not even good enough to generate anything worth sampling.

Courts should also be more fair in awarding damages and follow-up royalties. All of the restrictions on copyright for sampled music really stifle the possibilities when it comes to music making.

What driving all of this at the end of the day is that big money wins... Big labels and artists get to sample whoever they want and just pay out a small percentage of the proceeds later on and tunes are even made more popular by sample controversies like this one, while the little people not only get ignored by radio, magazines, and music outlets, but then you won't even hear them because flagged samples in their work prevent them from even posting their music anywhere.

I did a remix of Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston and can't post it anywhere because of copyright flags when I try to upload it and give proper credits... The original came out long ago and now is probably past the sales hump. Played it out once on a club night and it was a hit there... It's just sitting on my Hard Drive forever... Never to be heard.

This reminds me of the entire Right to Read by RMS.

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