Not everything is a remix, and it's not okay to steal. Then again, people don't care about the truth, only whether they believe it's true.
Agree.
Well most interesting artists have their roots and influences, but there's building on what's already there and there's copying
Agree.
I'm not condoning cutting & pasting.
I said I wanted to stay out of the legal argument.
And I also said that this was definitely a case of "re-use".
The reason for my "originality" comment was potentially misunderstood.
My old mind wanders from point to point a bit randomly without always fully articulating its thread.
So here goes:
My thinking is that true cutting and pasting is probably easy to determine (like this one).
And true originality is probably easy-ish to determine; but harder.
(did Bach or Mozart use that particular arpeggio?)
But it still implies that between these absolutes of "copy" and "not copy" there must be a line where it trips over from one to the other.
And IMHO that line is messy to define.
And that's where the trouble is potentially going to happen.
I suspect the law will begin, as it has, with well-intended principles; but will then probably evolve over time based more on precedent of who's got the good lawyers and has won cases than on any principle of music.
There is a risk that this type of litigation may in fact stifle the creative process (and make lawyers wealthy); while artists become increasingly paranoid about whether the tune that has popped into their head is truly "original", was "partially inspired", was "heavily inspired" or was an unintended "rerun" of something that they'd heard before.
Hell, it might even create an IT opportunity for apps that take a musical phrase and search through known history for all songs that have something probabilistically similar; then apply a probability of being litigated with the current law and output the likelihood of being sued under the current law.
But I'm not being intentionally pedantic.
From my own experience I will often noodle around and find a melody that sounds really cool to me and genuinely have
absolutely no idea at all whether it is an "original" tune (however defined) that has come out of my own creative spirit, or is a phrase I heard last week or was a bit from "what's up pussycat?" that I heard in my youth.
