Sam Smith was enough of a gentleman to admit his mistake and come to friendly financial terms with Tom Petty. It's too bad Alan Thicke couldn't do the same...he deserves the ruling.
Blurred Lines has even less in common with it's inspiration. It does what music has been doing since the beginning - updating the best ideas of the past with a twist from the present. If writing a song like Blurred Lines is against the law, I don't see how music can thrive.
12 bar blues is, essentially, a musical metronome. 12 bar blues inherently does not have a melody. It's an assembled grouping of public domain chords set in a public domain tempo. The point of the musical metronome of 12 bar blues is for the melody line to be added. That's what differentiates "Stormy Monday" from "Cold Shot" from "Steel Mill" from "Who Do You Love."
By comparison, using a melody on top of a chord progression is what is called a "musical composition." In the case of the Smith/Petty situation, there was a noteworthy musical composition overlap. Do I think it was very strong? Not especially, but was it there? Yeah, it was.
That's what makes the Blurred Lines case so easy for me to understand - it wasn't about the song taking a "feel" or "sound" - which it most certainly did - it was about the song taking the structural components in the form of progression and melody and trying to lift them under the guise of doing something new. That's not legally protected, and I think the jury got it right.
I totally see how music can thrive - now, if I come up with a cool new pop song, some sticky fingered producer can't simply come along and song-jack me. I can be inspired by Jimi Hendrix, just like Stevie Ray Vaughan. I can be inspired by Dimebag Darrell, but there's no way that I'd go out and try to re-work "Floods" or "Cowboys From Hell" and pass it off as my own work. Music has been around longer than the internet, longer than even the written word.
I think it's foolish to say "Oh music is in danger!" when the reality of the situation is actually "Oh the music business of making profits is in danger!" The former is certainly not true with the advent of new music technologies. The latter is fundamentally threatened by the former, and I'm perfectly fine with that.
I was using the blues as an easily available example of musical borrowing. You seem to think different rules should apply to blues songs than to "compositions." Blues songs are compositions. They have melodies. Their chord progression is just as common the one used in Stay With Me.
You're incorrect about Blurred Lines. The song did NOT take the progression and melody from the Marvin Gaye song. They have different progressions and melodies. What Blurred Lines took from Marvin Gaye was the drum beat. As a drummer, I can tell you thousands of songs use the exact same drum beat. Granted, this beat is pretty unique. But so is the Purdie shuffle, and to my knowledge, Bernard Purdie never sued John Bonham for Fool in the Rain.
Here's where you're right: It is foolish to say "Music is in danger." But what I said was that it will be harder for music to thrive. Look what patent trolls are doing to the tech industry. If we agree that having the same drumbeat is plagiarism, the same thing could happen to music.
Apparently, on the stand, Pharrell even admitted that the bassline is fundamentally the same. He routinely said it took him "about an hour" to put the song together, and personally, I find that says a lot about the genesis of the song. It's one thing to use customary verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus-verse and put it in, say, the key of D, but some of the best wizards in the business still have to put a bit of elbow grease in to make a hit. "Blurred Lines" sounded like a kareoke version to me, straight up.
I think the Sam Smith thing was a lot less clear cut than this one, but after hearing the tweaked sound comparison, I can understand why everybody just wanted it to get solved and go away.
He says "everybody get up"? Is that what you mean?