Opinion ID: 6321960
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Musical Background

Text: We begin by briefly explaining some vocabulary that we rely on throughout this opinion. A musical scale is essentially a sequence of musical notes or tones ordered by pitch (i.e., how “low” or “high” each note is). To illustrate this concept, a standard piano or keyboard instrument has white and black keys organized in a twelve-key repeating pattern. If one starts with any key on the piano and plays twelve white and black keys in order from left to right, she will have played all the notes of the “chromatic” scale in ascending order. That ordered sequence of twelve notes— which repeats itself at higher and lower registers across the 1 We accept the amicus briefs submitted by (1) the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Music Publishers’ Association, (2) the Motion Picture Association, (3) a group of 110 individual songwriters and other music industry professionals, along with Nashville Songwriters Association International and Music Arts Coalition, and (4) a group of musicologists. See Dkt. Nos. 51, 54, 56, 58. We deny as moot defendants’ motion to strike material from plaintiffs’ opening brief, Dkt. No. 29, because we conclude that even if we were to consider the purportedly improper material, we would still decide this case in defendants’ favor for the same reasons given in this opinion. 6 GRAY V. HUDSON keyboard—can be thought of as the musical equivalent of an artist’s coloring palette, as one can rearrange these notes into more complex sequences and add rhythmic (i.e., durational) variety to create memorable tunes. In practice, many songs are based on scales that use only a smaller subset of the twelve notes in the chromatic scale. These scales have different names depending on which notes are chosen. The scale we are primarily concerned with today has seven notes and is called the “minor” scale. 2 As with other scales, the notes in the minor scale can be referred to with alphabetic names (A, B, C, etc.), but the parties have generally opted to refer to them with numerical degrees indicating each note’s ordered position in the scale. We agree that is the more convenient approach here. The image below, taken from the beginning of defendants’ answering brief, illustrates how numerical scale degrees correspond to different keys on a piano in the minor scale 3 (the image begins with the third note of the scale on the far left rather than the first note—as discussed, the notes on a piano repeat themselves every twelve keys in different pitch registers): 2 Our discussion here is slightly oversimplified, as the minor scale comes in three distinct forms. However, the differences between those versions are not material to resolving this case. Likewise, we do not find it necessary for present purposes to distinguish between the concept of a “scale” and the related concept of a “mode,” which is also mentioned in the parties’ briefing. 3 Specifically, the image corresponds to the natural minor scale in the key of A, which uses only the white keys on a keyboard. GRAY V. HUDSON 7