According to Lauren Berg’s report for Law 360, on the jury trial held in Los Angeles late July 2019, Todd Decker, the plaintiff’s expert witness, claimed that in determining musical similarity between two works, “[t]he most important tool is listening.” His statement is utterly wrong. Copyright academic and musician, Jamie Lund, has established through empirical study that most people find musical works to be similar based not on shared primary musical elements like melody, harmony, and rhythm, but rather on secondary or sonic elements like volume, timbre, instrumentation, and style. Such elements, even combined in a distinctive manner, do not constitute protectable musical expression.

There is nothing original or protectable about the musical expression at issue: a few rhythmically monotonous scalar descending notes, repeated ad nauseam. Accordingly, Decker focuses on alleged similarity of sounds. According to Berg:

“The phrases also have a similar timbre — or distinctive quality of sound — using synthesized sounds to create a “pingy,” artificial sound in the beat, Decker explained… Even the texture of the sound in the phrases, such as the number of instruments being used, is unusually “empty,” Decker said, with both introducing their beats in isolation (my emphasis). Copyright protects sounds — when they comprise  an independently protectable sound recording of a musical work, whether protected or in the public domain.

Until judges recognize and curb this perfidious — or perhaps merely witless — conflating of sound and music by “expert” musicologists playing to the sympathies of bewildered jurors, we can expect a continuing blitz of meritless claims like this one, and the deleterious constraints and ambiguities they impose on popular musicians and the American music industry.

This dispute also raises the question of the significance of access in determining copyright infringement. Of course the defendants had access to the plaintiffs’ song. Today the recordings of even the most obscure performers are universally available on the Internet. Now that everyone has access to everything, access should no longer have any relevance for evaluating infringement claims involving popular music.

Finally, what to make of the plaintiffs’ claim that Perry’s song “tarnished” the devoutly religious message of theirs, with its “witchcraft, paganism, black magic, and illuminati imagery.” Presumably they’re referring not to the music or words of Perry’s song, which are entirely innocuous, but rather to the hodgepodge of pseudo-Egyptian settings, props, costumes, and horseplay deployed in the video recording of Perry’s performance – readily available without charge on the Internet…

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The 2017 Opinion (below) by Judge Snyder of the District Court, Central District of California, was issued in connection with an imaginative move by Perry’s lawyers to have the court establish that Perry’s live performances of “Dark Horse” could not have infringed “Joyful Noise” because the blanket ASCAP performance license for these performances included “Joyful Noise”.

On July 29, 2019 a jury in Los Angeles found Perry, et al. liable for infringement. One can only hope on appeal “Dark Horse” Perry stifles whatever “Joyful Noise” this verdict may have elicited from the Plaintiffs.

Adam Neely, a jazz musician in New York, provides a superb denunciation of the verdict, and the expert who advised the jury, in this YouTube video.