Here is a comparison of two songs with identical descending scales. The family of the writer of the Spirit song want some cash from Jimmy Page. Granted, they're similar, but imagine the can o' worms if anybody can claim ownership of a sequence of 5 notes?
 
This is actually old news, but I never heard the outcome of the lawsuit from last fall.
 

 

My Funny Valentine comes to mind too. With corporate lawyers and enough money they can and will own whatever the law passers determine what it's worth to them 

How ridiculous, there must be thousands of songs with descending chromatic bass lines like that. 
 
What's next, Britney Spears sued by Barbara Streisand for the chordal similarities between "Oops! I Did It Again" and "Woman In Love"? Go for it Babs! (or the Bee Gees, I'm not sure how this works )

Part I of 'Everything's A Remix' has quite a few examples from tunes

I think Bapu owns Am.

Time to copyright the 12 bar I think....

That's going to be a decision to watch.  If, in fact, a copyright infringement is granted to the family of the Spirit member, it makes me wonder if you could copyright certain chord changes with descending bass lines like C, C/B, C/A, C/G, C/F which appear in songs like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Piano Man, America, American Tune, Whiter Shade of Pale and a zillion others.

Makes me wonder...

jude77
That's going to be a decision to watch.  If, in fact, a copyright infringement is granted to the family of the Spirit member, it makes me wonder if you could copyright certain chord changes with descending bass lines like C, C/B, C/A, C/G, C/F which appear in songs like "While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Piano Man, America, American Tune, Whiter Shade of Pale and a zillion others.

I've wondered the same thing about that classic descending scale/chord structure. Maybe it's only copyrightable by the first person to use it, who would have lived in a century well before the 20th so for all intents and purposes it's in the public domain.

tlw

I've wondered the same thing about that classic descending scale/chord structure. Maybe it's only copyrightable by the first person to use it, who would have lived in a century well before the 20th so for all intents and purposes it's in the public domain.

I think that a lot of this will finally take the road that if the copyrights thing takes off in favor of the "owners", that music will die, or will be "controlled" by a handful of people. And the owner of two or three of these, will immediately pull a BACH and do a poop load of variations upon the theme, and then nail everyone else.
 
Judges and the law, need to put a stop to this.
 
No music, anywhere, should be about one note, or two notes or three notes. If someone can only think they were taken advantage of, in some ways they were ... and that's like saying the Rolling Stones do not owe some Chicago black musicians millions of dollars ... the whole thing becomes sick! It's about the whole piece of music ... there are similarities between Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, but no one here is sitting down and saying ... ohh those three violins just did exactly the same thing ... shame on you Beethoven!
 
We need to put a stop to this insanity! It's people trying to confuse and convolute the whole thing, to find a way to steal some money.
 
I sympathize with Spirit, and their highly original work, however, in the end, saying that anyone ripped off anyone, in this context, will only serve to hurt the music in the future and not help people learn it, because now you have to pay the teacher and there will be fees for having to teach you a scale that the teacher has to pay his higher ups ... the whole thing is just robbery and "city of lost children" ... stealing the kids dreams! And music!