Bloomberg on musical riffs and Copyright issues

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-classic-rock-riffs-loophole/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Sitting in the courtroom that day, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Were some of the most famous passages in rock history really not protected by copyright? And did this also apply to any number of other songs whose deposit copies were certainly equally lacking? I felt as if someone had dropped $100 bills on the ground. Countless unregistered bits of song—guitar solos, bass lines, horn parts, background vocals—could be sitting out there exposed to unscrupulous financial exploitation. Ring tones, TV ads, film soundtracks—or even entire new songs—could be made and sold from these orphaned riffs.

Something had to be done. I would pick up these musical $100 bills, these bits of song, and for safekeeping stitch them into a composition that I would copyright as mine.

I would call it Purple Hotel Sympathy for the Stairway to Run.

Led Zeppelin won at the 2016 trial, but the matter isn’t resolved, and the stakes seem to have actually grown. Malofiy appealed, and in September, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a Stairway do-over trial for procedural reasons. At the heart of the judges’ decision was a potentially industry-changing declaration: For pre-1978 unpublished songs, the deposited sheet music “defines the scope of the copyright.”

That ruling set off second appeals by both sides. Led Zeppelin asked for the original verdict to be upheld. Malofiy asked the entire appeals court, and not only three judges, to decide on the narrow issue of deposit copies. In early June, the San Francisco appeals court voted to have a rare 11-judge panel rehear the case in September, suspending the earlier appeals decision. The only topic on which the court has asked the parties for briefs so far is the primacy of deposit copies. The litigation has broader implications, undergirding a high-profile New York case in which plaintiffs are demanding more than $100 million for the alleged theft of Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for Ed Sheeran’s hit Thinking Out Loud .

The irony is there may be no winning outcome for Led Zeppelin. As Page’s testimony showed, the harder his lawyers push for strict readings of the copyright sheet music, the more they weaken the protection for Stairway. They’re going all-out, too. The legal team for the band and its publisher, Warner Music Group Corp., wrote in a December filing about “the primacy of deposited sheet music” as a bedrock of their industry and how “contracts are entered into in reliance on the certainty that a copyright protects the copyrighted work.

Also how sheet music ownership is handled is at play for copyrights.

 

[TheBigA]

It's an interesting article. I'm reminded that guitar solos in rock aren't written down. They're performed. They're adlibs, not formally written. But there are two forms of copyright in music: Circle "C" and circle "P." Every song has both, and it sounds as though this trial mainly focused on the P part which is the publishing copyright, and not the actual performance. Not sure why that is. The sheet music is published, but the recording is its own copyright. That's why sampling a riff in any song is an infringement on the copyright. So Jimmy Page's solo in Stairway is protected by copyright, but not the publishing copyright, because it's not in the original sheet music. I think that's what surprised even Jimmy. There are ways to put the music into a computer, and have the solo written mechanically. But that technology didn't exist in 1969.

 

[CTListener]

It's an interesting article. I'm reminded that guitar solos in rock aren't written down. They're performed. They're adlibs, not formally written. But there are two forms of copyright in music: Circle "C" and circle "P." Every song has both, and it sounds as though this trial mainly focused on the P part which is the publishing copyright, and not the actual performance. Not sure why that is. The sheet music is published, but the recording is its own copyright. That's why sampling a riff in any song is an infringement on the copyright. So Jimmy Page's solo in Stairway is protected by copyright, but not the publishing copyright, because it's not in the original sheet music. I think that's what surprised even Jimmy. There are ways to put the music into a computer, and have the solo written mechanically. But that technology didn't exist in 1969.

Of course, the Stairway case was not about Page's iconic solo at the end of the song but the intro, which is a melodic, straightforward passage with no hint of improvisation It surely existed as notes on paper and was played according to those note at the same time Page would have been fiddling with the details of his solo, wouldn't it? Or doesn't that matter?

 

[TheBigA]

Of course, the Stairway case was not about Page's iconic solo at the end of the song but the intro, which is a melodic, straightforward passage with no hint of improvisation It surely existed as notes on paper and was played according to those note at the same time Page would have been fiddling with the details of his solo, wouldn't it? Or doesn't that matter?

The actual sheet music is shown in the linked article, and you can see those notes from the start of the song. The notes make up the melody that Robert sings, but the notes don't give the nuance to the playing that Jimmy does. In the article, Jimmy asks to have them scroll down a little more, and it sounds like he was looking for his solo in the sheet music, and apparently it's not there. I've heard that same discussion about stage directions in a play. You can write the words in a script (which will be covered by circle P copyright) but its harder to write facial expressions or other performance elements. Those are normally covered by circle C copyright.

I agree that the case was about the beginning of the song, and not the solo. But this article makes it sound as though all those iconic guitar solos aren't covered because they're not in the sheet music, and I don't think that's true. The performance is covered under a different copyright, and the article doesn't mention that. That's what makes these copyright cases so difficult.