The ‘Blurred Lines’ case scared songwriters, but its time may be up

In my case it changes when the next article comes up. This is a really weird page format some online news magazines have adopted, where they simply add different articles at the bottom of your original page, infinite scrolling style. If you scroll back up though, it switches back.

Would you prefer he demanded royalties instead, as their label would if he used a few seconds of their output in one of his films? Or that they just be able to use the sample without credit or royalty?

At least in that case and the Blurred Lines case there was some component that was verifiably the same.

(But yeah, QT was and is a jerk. Especially when you consider how he ripped off City on Fire.)

I find plenty of remixes on YouTube now. Yes they get taken down but there’s ways to take those offline.

I need to tell you this: in the 2000s we worked off the strategy and tactics outlined in The Manual and had a string of global chart topping successes

I can only assume others did the same...do u know the bigger story?

Was it Jesus Christ Superstar? I actually do hear the similarity but I wouldn't call it a ripoff either. I love the KLF!!

Riff starts on the beginning of both tunes.

Jesus Christ Supertar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqoeM18vCaU

What Time is Love? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28w2LVzxVkU

Stairway is not a ripoff of Taurus and it never was going to be, but there are plenty of other accusations against Led Zeppelin that are more credible. I have Spirit’s eponymous album, the part in question that is “ripped off” is so basic and found in so many songs you’d die before you could list them all.

(FYI—You the news you “think you saw recently” is in the linked article above the fold, which features a photo of Robert Plant right next to the headline.)

the one riff is vaguely similar, but the Taurus song includes a simple descending riff that sounds like something from a guitar intro book. All music has similarities to something. Even Bach and Mozart borrowed ideas from other composers and later ones did to same to them. You can't just take a snippet and go aha! No different than the Oracle attempt at Google over Java.

I agree with all the arguments in this thread about Stairway to Heaven but also feel like for similar reasons the Blurred Lines case should have been dismissed.

Since when do cover artists pay royalties?

Actually listening to a Robert Johnson album, I was surprised to discover a some Zeppelin rifs were taken from him. Its not the same though (Robert Johnson is a hard listen.). Blues is slightly harder as the chord progression is similar across songs, similar scales. Its seams that sometimes they gave writing credit to the original song writer, sometimes not.

(Songwriters get paid per radio play, which mattered a lot before streaming..)

Wikipedia has a list of Zepplin song "inspired by others": with a list of listed song writing credits.

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

The Beatles covered a lot of songs in the early days. (I think they must have paid royalties). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_songs_covered_by_the_B...

That there is continuum is irrelevant when the human comprehension is discreet. For example, panton colours contain less then 2k values.

I hear what you are saying but 'finite' isn't that restrictive. There are some pretty big numbers that are still finite.

> We're guaranteed to end up with doppelgänger choruses and melodies sooner rather than later.

Technically that's fine. Copyright only protects originality, not novelty as with patents. Coincidentally creating the same melody as someone else doesn't violate their copyright. If they sued they'd have to prove that it wasn't coincidental with evidence that you heard the original melody, a prerequisite for proving that your melody was derivative.

That's the theory. In practice the first person to publish the melody often wins, especially if their version was popular--e.g. a radio hit, which by itself provides circumstantial evidence that you had heard it.

Technically infinite, there's just finite number of notes and intervals that are generally considered pleasing to the human year (and perceptible by the human ear for that matter).

You can construct finite sets of melodies but when you start to consider rhythm (Loads of pop songs use basic polyrhythms!) and more exotic intervals it's way way bigger than you might imagine.

This also completely ignores there is not a finite number of notes - ever heard someone play a theremin? - and even you restrict yourself to finite tuning systems, there are many to choose from. These can also be used in a pop context - if extremely rarely.

Exactly, I immediately thought of all the bog standard country, rock and blues songs.

Sure.

Probably. Would it hurt Star Wars?

> What if the entire piece of media is really short and 10 seconds is most or all of it?

If the creator cared, he'd make it longer. Seriously, why should a 5 second movie be worthy of major copyright protection?

For example, if I wrote a 100 line computer program, should that be worthy of copyright protection. I'd say "no".

A creator of a 10-second movie should consider it advertising for his skills, and hope and pray people copy it and use it all over the place.

I've also made my code Boost licensed, which is equivalent to "no copyright protection". If people use it for whatever, I figure it's great advertising for my (very expensive) consulting rates.

I heard (and have no idea if it is true or not) that back in the 80s Microsoft was not particularly concerned about piracy, because it was great advertising and often led to people buying the product.

DOS was indeed pirated all over the place, and Microsoft rose to be the biggest company in the world. Cause and effect? Who knows!

> Would they just not be copyrightable?

Why not?

(BTW, short stuff can be trademarked, as long as you use it as branding in commerce.)

Does it matter? Getting granted a "limited-time" (ha) monopoly is only because it encourages the arts, commerce, and advancement. That monopoly is oppressive, so the public better be getting something out of the deal.

The workarounds for WSJ do not work anymore for me, eg the redirect from FarceBorg will still get the "subscribe" page. Also FT. They appear to have removed workarounds. Are they STILL valid HN submissions ... even when there is NO workaround?

Or maybe there is one and i haven't twigged to it yet:-)>

I don't buy this, there must be some false positive rate in some of these sites. I've been told that I've viewed too many articles on sites I've never visited before.

It's happened at home too where I live alone and have not seen my IP address change in a very long time.

The value in HN is mostly in the comments, not in its role as a link aggregator. A good 90% of the time when the link is to something I cannot access I can still get all the salient points necessary to understand and benefit from the discussion just from reading the comments. (Also, if it is a story on some reasonably current event or some well known subject there is a good chance a quick visit to a search engine will find some other article that covers nearly everything in the submitted article but that I can read).

I think of HN as like a social gathering. Each discussion thread is like a small group of people at a party standing around talking about some topic. It's a big party, and there are dozens of such small groups, constantly forming and breaking up, as people move from group to group.

If I'm at a party, and I see a group discussing a book they have read and I have not, I'm either going to ignore their discussion completely if I'm not interested in the topic or am planning on reading the book later and want to avoid spoilers, or go ahead and join in if I'm interested in the topic and and not worried about spoilers and they are discussing it in general enough terms.

I'm not going to try to tell everyone at the party that they should only talk about books that everyone there has read.

If there is some particular site(s) that someone just does not want to see on HN at all, it's easy to address that with a couple bookmarklets. Here's one that will hide NY Times articles from the listings:

  javascript: (function () {
    var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
    for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
      if (stories[i].href.includes('://www.nytimes'))
        stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = 'hidden';
  })()

It would be easy to expand it to cover multiple sites.

Here's one to unhide them:

  javascript:(function () {
    var stories = document.getElementsByClassName('storylink');
    for (var i = 0; i < stories.length; ++i)
      stories[i].parentNode.parentNode.hidden = '';
  })()

Stick those bookmarklets someplace easy to invoke, and then at the cost of one click per page of 30 links you don't have to see the site(s) again.

what browser, etc are you using? I'm on FF with uBlock in Canada and always get the NYT's own login/subscribe overlay that while not an ad is essentially a redirect to a login or register page.

I guess it works though; I'm not about to sign up to the NYT or WSJ and I don't even bother clicking their links, so mission accomplished!

I'll take the bait. It's 2020, is the NYT still considered highly reputable? Or is it just a "loveable brand name" at this point?