badrogue17 wrote:
Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
pittmike wrote:
These suits are funny. Stairway I can see but Harrison got jobbed on a suit against My Sweet Lord. Does a person have a case if it simply sounds alike or do they have to prove an actual theft? There are only so many riffs and harmonies when you think about it.
The chord pattern from "He's So Fine" was unique enough that it was pretty obvious that the nearly identical "My Sweet Lord" was plagiarized. I don't believe Harrison consciously "stole" the song though. It was just a pattern he had heard countless time in "He's So Fine" and he inadvertently used it in a "new" song.
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"G-E-D" and "G-A-C-A-C are the chords sequences in question.
Yeah. The Court's thought process in a little more detail:
"The Court noted that HSF incorporated two basic musical phrases, which were called "motif A" and "motif B". Motif A consisted of four repetitions of the notes "G-E-D" or "sol-mi- re"; B was "G-A-C-A-C" or "sol-la-do-la-do", and in the second use of motif B, a grace note was inserted after the second A, making the phrase "sol-la-do-la-re-do". The experts for each party agreed that this was a highly unusual pattern.
Harrison's own expert testified that although the individual motifs were common enough to be in the public domain, the combination here was so unique that he had never come across another piece of music that used this particular sequence, and certainly not one that inserted a grace note as described above.
Harrison's composition used the same motif A four times, which was then followed by motif B, but only three times, not four. Instead of a fourth repetition of motif B, there was a transitional phrase of the same approximate length. The original composition as performed by Billy Preston also contained the grace note after the second repetition of the line in motif B, but Harrison's version did not have this grace note.
Harrison's experts could not contest the basic findings of the Court, but did attempt to point out differences in the two songs. However, the judge found that while there may have been modest alterations to accommodate different words with a different number of syllables, the essential musical piece was not changed significantly. The experts also pointed out that Harrison's version of MSL omitted the grace note, but the judge ruled that this minor change did not change the genesis of the song as that which previously occurred in HSF."
http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm
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