Is This a Reasonable Solution for “Blurred Lines”-Type Situation?
This comes from Pitchfork:
It seems to me that the real problem with “Blurred Lines” was not its plagiarism, but the lack of a legal structure for acknowledging that musical debt and repaying it in some measured way. No one disputes that “Blurred Lines” owes something to Marvin Gaye. Maybe not as much as the $7.4 million the jury awarded, but how were they to choose a proper amount? There is no standard. And it’s this lack of a standard—not the fact of plagiarism in music—that needs fixing.
Plagiarism is endemic to music: classical composers quote one another, or simply lift melodies for reuse; folk musicians set different lyrics to the same traditional tunes, thus claiming them as their own; jazz players alter changes and invent a new title to mask a pop standard; and rock bands…well, they mostly just don’t apologize.
