Is this plagiarism? (Update: jury says no)

Imagine a painter in their studio, preparing for an exhibition. The painter is working on a landscape. The sky is midnight blue. The valley is Kelly green. Mountains loom in the back, a spectacular hue reflecting off a brilliant sunset.

The painter reaches for vermillion and then pauses. Wait a second, they think: Does someone own the copyright to this shade of red? Am I going to get sued for this?


That would be crazy, right? Regrettably and amazingly, in the music industry the aesthetic equivalent of this thought process is no longer as insane as it sounds.

The question of who is allowed unfettered access to the metaphorical color palette of songwriting is currently on trial in federal court in Manhattan.

The English singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran has been accused of stealing his song “Thinking Out Loud” from Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic “Let’s Get It On,” by the wife and descendants of that song’s co-writer, Ed Townsend.

The supposed evidence? A similar but not identical chord progression used by both songs as a principal motif.


In its simplest terms, a chord progression is a sequence of grouped notes arrayed in the chosen manner of a composer to create a melody, the scaffolding on which essentially all songs are built.


To complete the metaphor, the lawsuit and its implications are the musical version of saying to a painter: You’ll have to pay to use red. Someone else used it first.


The dispute boils down to whether the millennia-long continuum of music-making is a valuable tradition that should be vouchsafed for future generations of composers, songwriters and listeners, or alternatively that entire swaths of the fundamental vernacular of a human art form should be divided up and parceled out as intellectual property for the private use and profit of a few.

Even by the standards of our time, this attempt to consolidate and monetize the joy and wonder of personal expression is sinister on an almost shocking scale. The potential ramifications and reverberations verge on the unspeakable.


The case presented by the Townsend estate is nakedly cynical and designed to play on fundamental and understandable misapprehensions about how songs are created.

Much like math or writing, music is limitless in its possibilities but paradoxically required to repeat itself.

The notion of copyrighting any chord progression, let alone one as common as the one used in “Let’s Get It On,” makes no more sense than copyrighting the numbers six and 13 or the conjunctions “and” or “but.”……

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...vin-gaye-lawsuit-chord-progression-copyright/