From: davei@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Mr D Ingles)
Newsgroups: rec.music.synth
Subject: Re: Midi song - "Borderline - Madonna"
Date: 12 Oct 92 14:51:28 GMT
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.

In article <1992Oct12.014605.19792@smsc.sony.com> dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott) writes:

>> When I first asked questions on this topic, I expected to hear clear-cut
>> guidelines - how wrong I was !

>That's because you asked the wrong people, or at least didn't get
>answers from the right ones.  I believe that there are fairly clear
>guidelines, but I don't know what they are.

Well fine, I asked the wrong people, but who are the 'right people'.  I
wrote a letter to the 'performing rights society' across here, and their
reply was similar to 'go and get a law student to study it for a few
years then come back and tell us the answer'. 

I wrote to the 'phonographic copyright' people and they didn't even
bother to reply. 

>If you use someone else's work knowingly, the case is pretty clear-cut
>already.  People who sample other peoples' works 

Ok, sampling I can understand - you can quite easily sample a CD and
effectively when you play it back you have the same sound as the
original CD played back.  Mind you, in saying this, I've heard chords
from different CD's that sound pretty similar to me. 

>The grey area comes when a piece "sounds" like another.

Can anyone explain '"sounds" like' please ? Ok a sample "sounds" like
the original - probably because the same instruments are being used in
both instances. 

With MIDI, the sounds of the instruments are not stored (neither are the
vocals for that matter) and therefore in my opinion sound nothing like
the original. When I set up my MIDI synth to play back MIDI sequences that
I've found, they never ever "sound" like what they are claimed to be an 
imitation of.

>In this case, 
>it's up to the plaintiff to show that you could have heard the song, 
>and that that significantly influenced you in your piece.  

Well that is very easy for the plaintiff to do.  Music is played on the
radio, on the TV in shops, over the phone, from computers, from pubs,
etc.  I hear music almost 24 hurs a day 365 days a year.  Of course it
is more than likely that I will be slightly influenced by what I've
heard.  Most of this music I hear I don't really want to hear but I'm
being forced to hear it. 

>Then again, 
>keep in mind that if you are making enough money in music for someone 
>to want to sue you, you ought to have enough sense to try and find 
>out what you can and can't do.  

Well I'm trying to find out but I'm not getting very far.

One of the reasons that I am trying to find out more about the subject
is that at the moment I am learning music.  I can't compose anything that
one could call music at the moment, so I am learning from books.  The
books are made up of scores from many famous pieces of music.  I was
originally intending on saving my efforts in a MIDI file and passing it
on to other beginners / friends so as they could do likewise and we
could all share our learning experiences. 

Thanks to all who have contributed to this discussion so far, sorry to
all those who see it as a waste of space. 

Davei