Marvin Gaye Estate Wins $5.3M ‘Blurred Lines’ Appeal
A US appeals court let stand a $5.3 million judgment awarded to the Marvin Gaye estate over infringement of Gaye's 1977 song 'Got To Give It Up,' by songwriters Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams on their 2013 hit 'Blurred Lines'.
By a 2-1 vote, the US Appeals Court said Gaye's 1977 song 'Got To Give It Up' was entitled to "broad" copyright protection. “We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the Thicke Parties’ motion for a new trial,” wrote Judge Milan D. Smith Jr.
But Judge Jacqueline Nguyen dissented, saying the songs were not similar enough because they differed in melody, harmony and rhythm. She accused the majority of judges o letting the Gaye Estate "accomplish what no one has before: copyright a musical style".
Judge Smith disagreed, writing: "Our decision does not grant license to copyright a musical style or ‘groove.’ Nor does it upset the balance Congress struck between the freedom of artistic expression, on the one hand, and copyright protection of the fruits of that expression, on the other hand. … Far from heralding the end of musical creativity as we know it, our decision, even construed broadly, reads more accurately as a cautionary tale for future trial counsel wishing to maximize their odds of success.”
Here's a side by side comparison:
fucking absurd. there is no infringement.
This is amazing and terrible for songwriters and producers. We are working in the AI field for music composition, and the feel aka gestural (which they did not quote in case?) of a song is an important aspect of music theory and composition/production, the gestural component. The judge did not voice this or was correct in this case, I will provide the full analysis of this gestural aspect in the coming week.
The concept of musical gestures aka “Feel” encompasses a large territory stretching from details of sound-production to more global emotive and aesthetic images of music, and also include considerations of cultural-stylistic vs. more universal modes of expression. In all cases, it is believed that musical gestures manifest the primordial role of human movement in music. For this reason, scholars speak of embodied music cognition in the sense that listeners relate musical sound to mental images of gestures, i.e. that listening (or even merely imagining music) also is a process of the incessant mental re-enactment of musical gestures.
Acknowledging the multimodal nature of music perception, embodied music cognition could represent a change of paradigm in music theory and other music-related research, research which has often tended to exclude considerations of bodily movement from its conceptual apparatus in favor of a focus on more abstract, notation-based elements of music. Focusing on musical gestures provides a coherent and unifying perspective for a renewal of music theory and other music research.
The first mathematical definition of gesture is given in the paper “Formulas, Diagrams, and Gestures in Music” (Journal of Mathematics and Music, Vol 1, Nr. 1 2007) by Guerino Mazzola (University of Minnesota) and Moreno Andreatta (IRCAM in Paris). A gesture is a configuration of curves in space and time. More formally, a gesture is a digraph morphism from a “skeleton” of addressed points to a “body”, a spatial digraph of a topological category (in the musical case: time, position and pitch). Since the set of gestures of given skeleton and topological category defines a topological category, one may define gestures of gestures, so-called hypergestures.
We will provide our concrete Music Theory-based analysis to DMN in the coming week. Let’s see if the gesture is the same.