Avoiding ‘musical landmines’
This notion of accidental infringement was the basis of a plagiarism lawsuit concerning George Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord,” the melody of which resembled “He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons. The case resulted in a New York court ordering the former Beatle to pay almost $16 million to the Bright Tunes music publishing company, after judging that Harrison had “subconsciously” copied the Chiffons’ tune.
To tackle the problem, the lawyer joined forces with his colleague Noah Rubin to develop an algorithm to find every possible eight-note, 12-beat melody contained within an octave. That’s 68.7 billion pop-style melodies. Once recorded to a fixed, tangible medium like a hard drive, these combinations of notes are considered copyrighted. Theoretically, they therefore cannot be used without crediting Riehl and Rubin, or their copyright is infringed.