WC Handy when facing copyright actions for publishing the blues said there are only eight notes in an octave and only so many octaves available so the same notes are going to reappear.

Keith Richards telling the Verve to get there own song when the stones first (two?) albu8m was all covers and Under my thumb is identical to Clarence Carter’s Slip Away.

A documentary called John Lennon’s jukebox which has the jukebox the beatles took on tour with them to the US and each record was ripped off for a beatles song. Lennon said something like fools borrow genius steals.

My least favourite is Bob Dylan’s management in the sixties copyrighting songs from the folk treadition under his name and restricting creativity for years to come.

The problem I see with copyright is that the creators don’t own the copyright in most of the actioned cases, it is just some speculator trying to make easy money. The men at work are being sued by somebody who bought the copyright after the death of the author. Vulture.

OK, the MAW thing doesn’t prove much - just threw it in cos it’s interesting. But as to the idea that copyright isn’t threatened, and the idea that digital technology makes it harder to infringe. Really? How much ‘illegal’ music sharing is going on these days? It’s several degrees of magnitude easier than the old taping off an LP thang, no? What i’m saying is that that technology gradually wears away the notion that copyright is legitimite. Eventually, that form of ownership become unenforcable.

You could compare it to the corn laws of the 1800s, which limited the import of corn in order to protect the rights of aristocrats. The sheer expansion of production and transport made that increasingly absurd. eventually, it was overturned.

I’m not suggesting that copyright is, will, or should be. But it’s definitely a site of struggle and contestation, which it wasn’t twenty years ago

All that’s happened so far is that the record company that has brought the action against the writers of Down Under has established that it owns the copyright in ‘Kookaburra Sits in The Old Gum Tree’.

Far from heralding the break down of IP law, the question of whether the MAW song infringes the copyright in Kookaburra will be decided according to traditional copyright principles. These include the degree of similarity between the two works and whether a substantial part of the original has been reproduced (this is a qualitative, not quantative, assessment) .

Your point about session musicians contributing to the composition process is well made. I remember talking to Herbie Flowers about how the bass parts on Walk On The Wild Side were put together and my recollection is that his view on ownership was pretty much as you stated it.

That said, in the bands I was in it was always clear who the actual songwriter was. The fact that other members of the band contributed to arrangements etc was acknowledged in one band by allocating a share of the songwriter’s publishing royalties to the other members. Copyright law also recognises joint ownership in cases where it’s not possible to separate out what one collaborator has created from what another collaborator has. Most bands don’t get around to dealing with these issues at the time for one reason or another, although I wouldn’t mind betting that they’re a bit more sophisticated about it now than 20 odd years ago.

People like former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow have been predicting the end of copyright as we know it for years now but it hasn’t happened.

Like any human construct, copyright law is not perfect. It evolves and sometimes struggles to keep pace with technology changes. However your piece is a bit muddled in its analysis. The main impact of digital technology to date has been to make it harder to stop infringing activity, not to invalidate the underlying principles of copyright. Given what’s at stake, I would put my money on the content owners coming up with a technological response to the infringement issue. In the meantime, the case law continues to apply the traditional principles to new situations (e.g. the Kazaa case) and the legislation is also updated.

Sampling has actually reinstated a practice common in the middle ages, when composers regularly quoted bits of other composers’ works. Again, technology has made it easier, but it still comes down to whether a substantial part of the original has been sampled. BTW - the previous comment is not wholly correct - the organ part in WSOP references Bach but is not a direct copy.