(03-12-2015, 09:37 PM)john Wrote: Psychology Today gets into the act. Huh? Seems like an odd question with respect to copyright.
Actually this makes a lot of sense to me approaching it from this angle.
I already had large misgivings about a jury , without years of training, making such a subjective decision for something that involves so many millions of dollars and is so pivotal to the ablity to be creative.
Whats worse is that the standard of proof is quite low in civil cases: preponderance of the evidence
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1586 amounts to not a heck of a lot more than "probably" and I'm 90% certain that only 5 of 8 jurors need to agree that there is a cause for action.
There really needs to be a lot more jurisprudence and congressional guidance on the subject to keep the whole thing from just being a "sounds similar to me" thing for people with different ears.... its almost certain that a good lawyer could convince a fair percentage of people that sections of one song sound like another and it becomes a sort of crap shoot to see if you happen to get 5 of 8 people malleable enough to hear it that way.
Rules like "not more than 16 bars can share more than a 90% correlation in rhymic and tonal patterns as defined in this techincal paper using tools of statistical analysis" seems like the only fair way to go.
Turn it over to Math majors who can look at it in an unemotional way.
I'm big on juries being able to judge things like whether or not a person is lieing criminal cases: Judging if people around you are lieing is something humans build real expertise in over their life experiences. For reasons the article lays out I just don't think jurors are equipped for the type of distinction that needs to be made in a predictable way.
