Re: Quoting Song Lyrics in Fiction (Australian Law)?

On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, Vance R. Koven <vrkoven[_at_]world.std.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, Derric Oliver <doliver[_at_]jazz.fantasyjazz.com> wrote:
> >
> > I encountered a situation in which a songwriter claimed that a new (and
> > platinum-selling) song infringed on the writer's pre-existing work.
> > After listening to both, it was clear that the musical note sequence of
> > the two were nearly identical (the tempo and musical genre were quite
> > similar as well). However, a musicologist opined that although the
> > pitch sequence similarity was undeniable, the metric stress differences
> > between the two songs was sufficient to warrant copyright protection for
> > both.
>
> That doesn't answer the question of whether work #2 infringed work #1.

Of course not, but it's on point for the present discussion, where work #1 is the public domain "Good Morning to You" and work #2 is the copyrighted "Happy Birthday to You" -- the question being whether the performance of the melody alone of HBTY infringes its copyright; i.e., is the trivial change of splitting a note into two notes, each having a duration of half the original note, sufficient to confer copyright?

I suspect, however, that Derric's example is somewhat more complex than splitting a single note into two.  

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