Which is ridiculous. You can't copyright 8 notes of music. This is the festering disease we need to rid ourselves of.
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I also really wish we'd gotten the explosion of almost completely sample-based music we were starting to see with bands like the Beastie Boys, the KLF, and Pop Will Eat Itself. The Biz Markie sampling case basically shitcanned an entire nascent subgenre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-uV8TGjaGU
Which sampled the guitar melody from Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG6fayQBm9w
And the "Rebel Fanfare" from the Star Wars Theme composed by John Williams.
https://youtu.be/_D0ZQPqeJkk?t=278
Which sampled this part of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Dukas. (Okay, not quite but it's easy to guess the inspiration.)
Without samples and sequencing being the primary production technique, suddenly real instrumentation and organic musicality became the thing. Hip hop started building on covered riffs and musical passages more than straight up samples (I’m guessing the licensing was easier).
That also gave us Check Your Head from Beasties, as the follow up to the pioneer sample-laden album Paul’s Boutique, where they famously played their own instruments again and became even more popular. The Native Tongues scene also gave us Prince Paul/Dr. Octagon, which gave us Deltron 3030 and Dan the Automator, which gave us Gorillaz, which…
There really was a lot I suspect would’ve gone quite differently without that court case.
An infringement being accidental also doesn't seem to stop copyright holders from successfully suing people. I think this means you could technically be successfully sued for dropping some bricks on a piano, since no matter where they land, the action constitutes a public performance of a copyrighted work. Fun stuff.
PS: I also second the Adam Neely video. I was actually wondering if someone would link it (:
The disappointing bit: I say it's an abridged version because I distinctly remember him talking about how he actually claimed copyright for all 8-note melodies under a permissive license, which I can't find in the one that actually loads. He "brute forced" every 8-note melody with a program, saved them to a disk and claimed copyright under (I believe) the MIT license. (I can see legal issues with doing that, of course, so it's not hard to imagine possibly why the video was replaced with a different one.)
I may not agree that it should be 8, but I don't see any rigorous or well-reasoned model here to explain why "you can copyright 8 notes" is a festering disease when it seems like people are not reasoning through why something should or shouldn't be copyrightable.