Re: copyright under stress

On 06/13/2000, James Brennan <brennandot[_at_]prodigy.net> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jun 12, 2000, Robert Cumbow <rcumbow[_at_]grahamdunn.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, 09 Jun 2000, Tim Phillips <hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > In music, the doctrine of "unconscious infringement" makes even
> > > original songwriting chancy, as Jerome Kern and George Harrison
> > > discovered to their rue.
> >
> > I know the Harrison case. What was the Kern case?
>
> Was it Jerome Kern? Could have been. It was a famous early
> 1900's composer who admitted that he had heard the original work
> and sub-consciously, without realizing its source, included it
> in his work. Anyway, I thought that the cases stood for the
> proposition that copying even "unconscious copying" was
> infringement.

I remember an instance (a case or hypothetical I don't recall) long before I was seriously interested in IP where a songwriter was accused of stealing a melody. Proof was difficult but the other songwriter's song seemed one that the accused would almost certainly have heard. The defense goes something like this: "I didn't steal it. I don't remember hearing it. If I did, perhaps unconsciously I remembered it and I thought it was my own. But, anyway, you stole it from Hoagy Carmichael (remember him?), who took it from Gilbert and Sullivan (I'm straining), who got it from Mozart, based on an old German folksong." Hard to prove? Sure, but what if you can show such a chain? Not being a musician, I wonder when a sequence of notes is an 'idea' and when it is an 'expression.' I know most will reject such a thought but it strikes me as germane.

Ran Pyle
UCF
<pyle[_at_]mail.ucf.edu> Received on Wed Jun 14 2000 - 13:55:10 GMT