Chapter 945 Plagiarism Judgment
Qin Jue frowned.
She opened her laptop and found the "victim song" "Flying Over the Stars", imported it into the audio processing software together with "Soaring" stored in her personal hard drive, and put on headphones to distinguish carefully.
There is a detailed process for judging whether a musical work is plagiarized in Blue Star. Simply saying "it sounds like XX" cannot be used as a strong basis. It depends on two aspects, namely "whether there is a contact channel between the suspected plagiarist and the plagiarized work" and "whether the work itself is substantially similar".
The contact channel is easy to understand. If someone privately writes a song demo on a whim, has not been publicly released on any platform, and has not played it to anyone in reality, then he or she first eliminates the possibility of being plagiarized from the contact surface. In other words, others don't know or have never heard you write such a melody, so they have no place to copy it if they want to.
In this case, if there is a similarity in music, it can only be that the creative ideas really collide, which is purely coincidental and does not constitute plagiarism.
Substantial similarity is not the popular online rumor that "several bars are similar and it is plagiarism", but it should be implemented in practice, based on "at least four consecutive bars of music", comparing the chord composition, melody direction, beat, tonality, theme, instrumentation selected for arrangement and actual performance effect, emotional color expressed in the work, etc. The more similarities there are, the greater the possibility of being judged as plagiarism.
In addition, there are three common misunderstandings, namely "music style", "music sampling" and "legal adaptation".
Musical style is easy to understand. For example, rock songs often have a cool and domineering electric guitar solo; for example, lyrical songs often have a clean and gentle piano melody as an introduction. Bass is often used in jazz, and violins are almost required in orchestral music. This is a nearly traditional, template-like component. As long as it is this music style, there must be similarities in the sense of hearing.
However, some listeners who are not sensitive to music arrangement will think "Hey, the style is similar, the melody is a bit similar, and the instruments are the same! Could it be plagiarism?" after listening to two songs. This kind of rough judgment without basis is pure nonsense, and the original creator who is accused is also very innocent.
After all, if this statement is really followed, then all songs with "dynamic beats" rhythm will be caught, and there will be no pure originality in the world, and everyone is plagiarizing.
Music sampling is somewhat similar to paper citation, which means that the arranger puts the music and sound effects within the scope of public copyright into his original song as it is or adapted.
For example, someone recorded a piece of wind sound, uploaded it to the Internet and said "everyone can use it at will, commercial use is also fine", then someone put this wind sound effect into the beginning of the song for emotional introduction, which is a kind of sampling, and you can't point at the creator's nose and say that he plagiarized someone else's "wind".
Similar samples include classical music created by musicians such as Beethoven, human voice chanting chorus recorded in early or recent years, drum hi-hat rhythm, electronic sound effects, etc. Music within the scope of public copyright is a treasure trove of materials left by past creators and benefiting future generations today.
As for legal adaptation, it is even simpler to understand. For example, A purchased the copyright of a song by singer B, re-arranged the song, re-wrote the lyrics, or extracted some of the sound source samples for re-creation, etc. The songs born through these behaviors are attributed to A's original works, which is fine and does not constitute infringement and plagiarism.
Qin Jue spent some time to go through "Flying Over the Stars" and "Soaring" from beginning to end. The song arrangement, drum beats, and melody are all visible in the software, just like two cows that have been disassembled into skeletons are placed in front of them, and the similarities between the two are compared from each bone.
After listening and watching for nearly half an hour, Qin Jue smacked his lips and got up from the table to touch the pocky box.
Her conclusion was that it was just a smack.
This situation is the most annoying. If you say it is not copied, it is indeed too similar; if you say it is copied, it is not really the case if you look closely.
Qin Jue held a pocky in his mouth with a helpless look on his face.
The style of "Soaring" is lively and cheerful, with refreshing guitars and dynamic drums in the instrumentation, and some electronic music is appropriately mixed in to facilitate leg shaking; "Flying Over the Stars", which was released two months earlier, follows a similar path, but the electronic elements dominate, the overall melody is slightly melodious, the rhythm is a bit slower, the lyrics are fewer, and not so fragmented.
The reason why "Soaring" included in "Thousand Colors" caused controversy is that its chorus is very similar to "Flying Over the Stars". The main melody of the climax of "Flying Over the Stars" is "1-7-6-5-7-", while the main melody of "Soaring" is exactly the same as the former if you listen to the accompaniment, but it becomes "[1]-[7]6, [6]5, [5]6, 5[7]-" when it is sung.
In addition, the overall rhythm of "Soaring" is faster than "Flying Over the Stars". The overall feeling is that "Flying Over the Stars" was turned into 1.25 times the speed, and then some "fragments" were added to the main melody of the chorus, which became the chorus of "Soaring".
The starting and ending notes are exactly the same, the context is highly similar, and the idea expressed is "I want to cross, I want to fly high", no wonder there is a suspicion of plagiarism.
But the embarrassing thing about this matter is that, among the four conditions of similar style + same instrumentation + similar theme + same chorus melody, only the last one is more convincing to say that it is plagiarism. As for the first three, to put it bluntly, it is because of the current shortcomings of the creation of pop music in Longguo, especially idol group pop songs.
There is serious homogeneity, the templates are all there, the melody, lyrics and instrumentation are all set, and the rhythm and beat are almost the same for the convenience of choreography. It is just a mediocre pop song. It is basically the same when you listen to it roughly, and most of them are not very good and have no memorable points. Maybe if you pick two songs randomly and show them to passers-by, they will think they are similar after listening to them.
Originally, they were just two assembly line products with only decent quality. But because the chorus is similar, this old-fashioned homogeneity factor was also dug out. All kinds of similarities are superimposed and then it is determined to be "plagiarism". At first glance, it seems that this is really the case.
If we evaluate according to Qin Jue's true inner thoughts, it is so boring to talk about who copied whom with these two songs that can barely be regarded as the chicken head and can't be regarded as the phoenix tail. Why don't you use this time to create good songs and pay more attention...
She "smoked" a pocky, took out her mobile phone and sent a message to Liu Huajun.
[Sister Liu, do you need help? ]
Liu Huajun's reply was only 20 seconds apart. Sure enough, she was still busy at this point. It was probably to discuss countermeasures urgently.
She replied with a voice message, and her attitude was always straightforward and refreshing. She said that it was too wrong to bother Qin Jue with such a matter within her job, but the last sentence "I have other questions to consult, let's talk when I have time" finally revealed a little clue. The situation or the collateral impact seemed a little pessimistic.
Qin Jue didn't know how bad the current situation was, but since Liu Huajun expressed her attitude, she didn't force herself to worry about it. She just said hello to Hu Changjian and asked her to pay more attention to the public opinion trend about "Qian Se" on the Internet.
This incident was undoubtedly an unprovoked disaster for Shi Yan and others, but since the song was bought by the company and was under their name, they would be pushed to the front and scolded as the most public-facing group.
The more supporters spoke out, saying "they had no right and qualifications to choose, it was all the company and the composer's fault", the more counterproductive it would be, and they would be accused of "taking it cleanly" and "only wanting to take benefits without taking responsibility".
After thinking about it, Qin Jue did not contact those children.
It was the teammates beside them, not her teacher, who always accompanied them on their journey.
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