The Columbia Law School Music Plagiarism Project collects music copyright infringement cases over the last century. Included are samples from original and alleged infringing songs, overviews, and text from legal opinions.
The purpose of this project is to capitalize on the distributed nature of digital information systems to collect, organize and distribute graphic and audio materials associated with music copyright infringement cases in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century on. This documentation, especially for cases over twenty-five years old, is difficult to obtain and has never before been systematically collected or published in print or electronic format. Our goal is to accumulate and publish a complete collection of music copyright infringement opinions, comments about the musical works they consider, and graphic and sound files of relevant portions of these works.
Plagiarism per se is not grounds for a tort claim; one sues for copyright infringement based on an alleged plagiarism. While many instances of plagiarism are not actionable under copyright law, we use this term because it has long been associated with the broad notions of wrongful appropriation and publication as one's own of another's expression that are at the heart of these music copyright disputes.
I like the site--the list of cases covered is pretty extensive--I wish it didn't muddy the waters (no pun intended) by collapsing the distinction between intellectual property rights infringement and plagiarism, two very different things. As the site itself notes in cases like Campbell v. Acuff-Rose (the Roy Orbison and 2 Live Crew versions of "Oh, Pretty Woman"), plagiarism is not really the issue here. And IP rights infringements are typically not concerned with whether or not the alleged infringer needed to cite their sources--doing so isn't a legal protection.
Or maybe it should be. If IP rights were treated more like academic authorship cases--where borrowing from other sources is not only accepted, but encouraged; Creative Commons licenses would be the norm rather than the rare, activist exception--we might not have the ugly mess we have today. (Remix away!)
[via metafilter.com]
Posted by johndanseven at December 17, 2005 11:25 PM