Shuman’s allegations are incorrect. There’s some similarity between the two songs, as I’ll show below, but it does not approach the level of copyright infringement. It should not result in Keys having to license Shuman’s composition or settle with him to use the song.
The complaint is a bit unusual in that it doesn’t really present evidence of copying. It quotes heavily from a blog post about the Keys song, which first noted the similarity. In a later post, the same blogger (Roger Friedman) describes a subsequent interaction with Shuman, by that point lawyered up and looking for some remuneration.
Hearing the similarities
At issue, apparently, is one line in the Alicia Keys song, which she sings about halfway through, and doesn’t repeat. For comparison’s sake, I’ve taken it out of context and placed it next to the similar line from the Holman song:
You can hear the melodic similarity. In technical terms, both songs feature the phrase “lonely girl” sung in a arpeggiated descending minor triad, followed by a second descending major triad (the top three notes of a minor seven chord). But if Keys knows Holman’s song, which seems likely, it’s hard to think of her reference as anything other than a quote.
Quotes, not samples
In Friedman’s blog post, he refers to that as an uncredited “sample.” He does it in kind of a snippy way, too: “Do they teach this sampling stuff at Juilliard?”
Some people think samples are inherently uncreative or unoriginal, and I think those people need to lighten up and listen to some music. But you’d have to be pretty far off the deep end to think that musical quotes are also unacceptable, or that each one requires a license agreement.
Mixing up samples and quotes is especially hazardous in this case. For one thing, sampling of short segments of a song would require getting permission from the owner of the copyright in the sound recording, not the owner of the composition. Shuman’s the songwriter, so he controls the composition, but not Holman’s recording.2
For another thing, samples are subject to a very strict interpretation of the law. Some people read the landmark Bridgeport v. Dimension case to say that no sampling is allowed at all without a license, no matter how short or insubstantial the sample is. But that’s not the case with musical quotes. In that case you get to do a full fair use analysis of the use, and these allegations wouldn’t stand up against that.
Girls and boys
So we’re talking about one line in a composition that was quoted, not sampled. How much of the original composition did Keys quote, then? Well, it may be useful to go back, here, to the original recording of the song. Before Holman’s smash hit 1970 version, Ruby & the Romantics recorded it in 1963. But the first recording (and the composition) was called “Lonely Boy.” Here’s the relevant section:
This is the original composition, and it’s about a boy not a girl. The song sheet attached to the complaint, too, is for a song titled “Lonely Boy.” That means we’re down to the word “lonely.” (Also, to my ear, the timing is a bit different in this version, with less swing than in either Holman’s or Keys’, but really that’s splitting hairs.) Even assuming that Keys was intentionally and explicitly making an overt reference to Holman’s recording when she sang the “lonely girl” line, it requires an extraordinary stretch to say that reference constitutes an infringement on the original recording.
Alicia Keys quoting even as many as six notes and a word or two from a popular song in a teeny tiny section of her new single just isn’t copyright infringement. I feel for Shuman as a songwriter, but he (and his lawyer) are wrong on this one.
The owner of the sound recording is almost certainly Holman’s record label, ABC Records, which folded into MCA Records, which folded into Geffen. Can you imagine why clearing such a sample might be difficult? ↩
I enjoyed getting this update from my dad about meeting a local UPS bike messenger. During the holiday season, UPS puts some of their drivers on bikes to reduce fuel costs and increase capacity while they’re delivering more packages than during the rest of the year.
Here’s the description my dad sent me in an email this week, and a photo he took of the messenger.
Who knew? UPS has a mini fleet of bicycle delivery guys. This is Umberto, who works Valley Vista Blvd & environs. He loads up from a truck trailer parked on Van Nuys Blvd, and makes several round trips (!) a day. Says he has counterparts “all over LA”. They work from before Thanksgiving to Christmas. He’s riding a stock ‘hybrid’, off-road frame with 21 gears and tires wider than street but thinner than stump jumpers. I’ve seen him climbing the local foothills in low gears for weeks. His trailer is an amalgam of a stock lower section augmented by PVC and bungees – a design “by my manager,” he says, though “we suggested the bungees to hold the load together better.” I had more to ask him, but he was obviously on the clock.
In November 2005, Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters gave an impressively candid answer about copyright terms being too long, and that she thought such a situation was a “big mistake.” Unfortunately link rot has begun to set in, and it was somewhat difficult for me to track down a copy of the video.
(When BoingBoing linked to the video in February of 2006, YouTube was in its first year of existence, and far from the ubiquity it’s since achieved. Instead, the post points to AVI, MP4, and MPG files [formerly] hosted on iBiblio.)
Advanced users of the New York Times may know about the “two-shift click” trick on that website: hit the shift button twice on any article page, and you then have the option to link to specific paragraphs or even highlight arbitrary sentences throughout the article, in a way that’s stored in the URL so you can send it around. It’s a shame it’s not more widely known — it’s pretty amazing.
Anyway, it works through a little Javascript plug-in called Emphasis, developed in-house at the Times and released open-source1. I poked around a little bit and found that a developer named Ben Balter has released a WordPress plugin to implement Emphasis on blogs, and so I decided to give it a spin. Now you can link to any paragraph and highlight any sentence in any post: just hit shift twice and click the pilcrow or the sentence and the URL bar will update.
Every site in the world should provide at least anchor links to different paragraphs, and Emphasis seems like a pretty good method for doing it. For now I just hope it’s helpful, but in the future I’d love to see more people using it.
There’s an important rule in the cryptography world: you should never implement it yourself. So much can go wrong in the implementation of a crypto-system that you’d better leave it up to experts. Funny, then, that exactly the opposite rule applies to planning CryptoParties.
Saturday I hosted the first CryptoParty SF at Mozilla’s San Francisco headquarters, where for a few hours a few dozen people got together and participated in lectures, discussions, and workshops about privacy, security, and cryptography. It was fun, and I think people enjoyed it, but there are a lot of things I plan to improve the next time around. Here are some of my thoughts about the event:
We had a limit on the size of the gathering because of the venue — 100 people — and we were able to hit that many registrations without much promotion at all. But in retrospect I realize that we needed to focus on not just hitting a certain number of participants, but also making sure the right people find out about it. In fact, it’s not much of a surprise that the people who find out about an event like CryptoParty without you doing outreach are crypto nerds. It’s great that they want to attend, but it would’ve been nice to get more people who were curious and not yet experts.
Building on that point: there’s a risk of making too onerous a registration process, but it would have been very nice to get an impression of how much background participants had in cryptography. Primarily to give that information to the speakers, who could have shaped their talks better. Unfortunately, several of the speakers expressed concern to me during and after Saturday’s event that the talk they prepared was too basic for the audience. I actually think every talk went smoothly, but it’s unfair to put the speakers in that position.
There’s no substitute for planning and preparing. Yes, this is a general event tip, but it applies here. I did a pretty poor job of lining things up in advance, and I was very lucky that things went as smoothly as they did. In large part, that smoothness was due to really talented and generous speakers who were willing to be flexible and work with me on short notice. But no matter how hard you work in the few days leading up to an event, you can’t beat talking with presenters well in advance and doing real event promotion for a few weeks or months.
That said, everybody in the room wanted the event to succeed. That’s a lifesaver. I really owe great thanks to not only the presenters but really the attendees, who were all on board and excited. It’s easy to get worried about an adversarial crowd — fortunately that wasn’t what I was facing.
Had CryptoParty SF failed it would have been my fault, but that it was (more-or-less) successful really falls on many others. Thanks to Tom Lowenthal at Mozilla who helped with organization, motivation, and providing a venue; to my colleague Micah Lee who built the registration site and provided all kinds of support; to all of the fantastic speakers (aestetix, Marcia Hofmann, Morgan Marquis-Boire, Eva Galperin, Lee from the Guardian Project, Seth Schoen, starchy, and Quinn Norton) who gave such great presentations; to Asher Wolf for hatching a pretty wonderful idea for an event series; and of course to all the people who came out to participate in this crazy experiment.
I’m already buzzing on a follow-up event, which I think will take place in January. More details, as they say, to come.
