Controlling the distribution of music — and thus making sure composers get paid for their labour and talent — has been a problem that dates back to the invention of the printing press.
In 1498, less than 50 years after Johannes Gutenberg revealed the printing press, a savvy entrepreneur named Ottaviano Petrucci received a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing musical notation with one of these new-fangled machines, giving him a monopoly on sheet music. He controlled the copyright and publishing of all music. But then in 1516, Pope Leo X stripped away Petrucci’s power when it came to organ music and gave it all to Andrea Antico, someone who pleased the pontiff more.
It took a while for these royal-granted monopolies to be wiped out, leading to the Berne Convention of 1886, which set the first true international standards for who had the right to copy and distribute intellectual property with a focus on the rights of the creators and not the publishers. Those terms have been renegotiated a number of times in the last century-and-a-half.
One area that’s blown up is allegations of copyright infringement by one musical artist upon another. We’ve seen it with cases involving George Harrison and the Chiffons, Marvin Gaye and both Robin Thicke and Ed Sheeran, Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, Sam Smith and Tom Petty, Vanilla Ice vs. David Bowie and Queen, The Hollie and Radiohead, Spirit and Led Zeppelin, and
. These accusations of plagiarism — many completely unfounded, in my view — have sucked up an enormous amount of court time and money.There’s a thriving industry of ambulance-chasing lawyers who “discover” that a newer song has certain sonic similarities to a song from the past. The composer of the older song is contacted and told that if they sign on, there could be a songwriting credit for them on the new song or at the very least receive some kind of out-of-court settlement.