From Katy Perry to Kraftwerk: What’s the problem with copying music?

The musical magpie is under threat. Recent legal judgments in both the US and Europe have made it harder for songwriters and producers to adopt samples, tunes or even moods from other people's music in creating their own. Katy Perry and her team of songwriters were ordered by a US jury to pay US$2.8m (S$3.87m) in damages for copying part of an 11-year-old Christian rap song in her 2013 hit Dark Horse. Meanwhile, the pioneering German electronic band Kraftwerk won a long-running case in the European Court of Justice over the sampling of a two-second rhythm from their 1977 track Metall Auf Metall. READ: Katy Perry told to pay S$3.7m for copying tune from a Christian rap song The balance of freedom of artistic expression versus copyright protection has swung heavily to the latter, after the free-for-all era of musical copying and sampling in the early 2000s. The old philosophy was that creative property is theft; today's is that composers control each note they write. Singers and writers deserve protection but the trajectory of legal cases, particularly in the US, is worrying. It is turning into open season for entertainment lawyers on even tiny snatches of melody or beats in hit… Read full this story

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