I wish for a world where people who would deny others the opportunity to profit from their creations are themselves denied. Let programmers sell t-shirts.
Open-source software aside—if I publish a paid app, and later someone else borrows my idea and publishes a differently-branded paid app that does the same thing, and it becomes popular enough for me to notice, can I sue them? IANAL but pretty sure it’s a loud “not unless you have a patent that they violated”.
In music business, if person A publishes a song, and person B borrows that idea[0] and publishes a song that uses it or even alludes to it, and that song becomes popular, there’s a clear lawsuit against B. It’s like there’s an implicit patent of sorts on every melody. Isn’t it at least somewhat mind-boggling?
[0] Bonus points if person B actually wrote the song independently and/or earlier than person A, but wasn’t running cameras to film the process.
> IANAL but pretty sure it’s a loud “not unless you have a patent that they violated”.
If they have violated patents, trademarks, or copyright, you can sue them for that. For example, if they reused your copy, or if they reused your proprietary source code.
But you've constructed your argument around the "differently-branded" idea, suggesting that there is no copyright case. The analogue in music would be a different song. You can't sue Rihanna over Umbrella for ripping off Stairway To Heaven, because they are different.
And yet, you don't argue with that copyright lawsuits over software apps should be outlawed.
You won't deny programmers the right to sue, the way you would deny that right to musicians. Programmers are allowed to be first class citizens in your world, while musicians are relegated to second class.
> It’s like there’s an implicit patent of sorts on every melody.
That's incorrect. This is the realm of copyright. Patent laws are not relevant.
I mean if you write an app that walks and talks like my app, without stealing my source, it is fair game and I can do nothing. Unless I explicitly patented some specific aspects that you also implemented, or you stole my branding, or I can prove you stole my source code, you did not violate a single thing.
Music business, meanwhile, behaves as if everything was patented by default.
You keep saying "patented" and it keeps being wrong. This is the realm of copyright.
And yeah, if nobody violated any copyrights, patents, or trademarks of yours, you can't sue them.
The analogy in music is: if nobody violated any copyright, patents, or trademarks of yours, you can't sue them.
In other words, there is no difference. The fundamentals are exactly the same.
Yet you're trying to equate a situation where you explicitly spell out that no infringements of any kind occurred, with a situation where copyright infringment is alleged to have occurred.
Exactly. The situation is the same fundamentally, yet copyright gone wild makes music business behave like software business would if everything was patented all the time.
If you literally clone HN or LinkedIn (but call them something else), no one can sue you without having to prove you violated a patent or stole the source. No copyright violation occurred despite two identical products.
If you compose a harmonic progression that bears semblance to one in a song by a famous pop star, you can and will be sued. You are guilty of violating copyright because your music sounds similar. Even if you call your song something else and the lyrics, the arrangement, the instruments used, everything is different. Even if no one can prove you stole any intellectual property. Etc.
And the icing on the cake, now apparently even if you were first and they were inspired by your melody they still win if you did not bother to record your creative process while they faked a convincing recording of how they “came up” with your tune “on their own”.
> If you compose a harmonic progression that bears semblance to one in a song by a famous pop star, you can and will be sued. You are guilty of violating copyright because your music sounds similar.
You are only liable for copyright infringement if a court decides there is sufficient similarity.
Similarity of harmonic progression on its own is highly unlikely to be enough to persuade a court unless that harmonic progression is highly distinctive — there will probably need to be other contributing characteristics in order to persuade the court.
This test is exactly the same as with copyright infringement for the written word. In both situations, a court must make a judgment call, and persuading a court that infringement has occurred is nowhere near as trivial as you are suggesting.
It is hypocrisy to deny musicians the right to defend their intellectual property that others in different industries enjoy, on the bogus basis that infringement is different for music.
Lawsuits we’re talking about involve incredibly common harmonic and melodic progressions[0], but that’s besides the point.
Key aspects of software—the way it looks and works—aren’t auto-copyrighted (right?), even if they are quite original and unique. Many common UI (timeline, photo grid, etc.) or API patterns arise because they spring to multiple minds because they simply make sense in given moment in given shared context; just like that arbitrary melodic progressions spring to mind as you play, and yes who’s there to say it didn’t spring to someone else’s mind before.
As someone both into music and software production, I personally will continue finding the notion of harmonic progressions or melodies as automatically copyrighted (or even copyrightable) as weird. There’s just so much more than that to any song or music piece, and making a field of creative passion a legal minefield doesn’t seem conducive to its thriving.
> Open-source software aside—if I publish a paid app, and later someone else borrows my idea and publishes a differently-branded paid app that does the same thing.
This isn’t analogous to the Ed Sheeran situation though. The analogy to the Ed Sheeran situation wouldn’t be someone copying software wholesale (obviously wrong) but another Twitter client using the ‘pull down to refresh timeline’ mechanism on an iOS app.
Twitter was granted a patent on "pull down to refresh". Patent law is a different areas of intellectual property law from copyright.
The songwriting case is a copyright case. The analogy for Twitter would be copying source code, but not with full fidelity. If it's not "obviously wrong" that's because it's not verbatim; it's up to the court to decide whether there is enough similarity between the two for infringement to have occurred.
