In this video, I want to talk about independent creation. Independent creation means people creating something that was the same or very close to the same without any contact of each other. They independently created something like this. If we were talking about patents and I came up with this guitarists and I came with some cool device to Ben strings in a really neat way and I did everything right, I started making it, I plucked on my own guitar then I wanted to sell it. That sounds cool right except here's what I have to do. I have to make sure, hope I'm going to be the first to do it. If someone had done this same device or something very close to it before me and received a patent on it, even though I created independently, I've never seen this device, I just came up with it on my own independently, I'm in trouble. I have to stop. So it's independent creation but patent law stops everyone from doing it. Now if that's a song however and I wrote a song called, I Think About You, last night and someone wrote a song called I Think About You five years ago, what if we have and offer a lot in common, a great among in common. Would I be in any kind of trouble? And the answer is probably not because even though our expression might be nearly identical, if I didn't have access to her song, then she cannot accuse me of copying her song. There are songwriters right now in North Dakota whose music I don't know and if I'm writing music and it's like someone from North Dakota, if I haven't had access to it, I'm not in trouble. So independent creation how it can work is it's something you have to consider that someone could have the same kind of ideas. If you say for example here's a case I was involved in. It was a song called I Think About You that sued another song called I Think About You. I was working for the defendant. They were Sony, because the record label is one of the parties that gets sued and it was calling Rey the famous country artist, it was a song he recorded written by three very good songwriters and a woman had a song called I think About You. According to her affidavit, she had handed a copy of her song to Conrey's manager in-store he did it came out somewhere in Texas and the manager doesn't remember, you often get things handed to you and you don't pay attention. But in either event, the manager never met the songwriters who wrote the song called I Think About You. So there's that issue we're being sued it's a federal case, it's a really big deal. Sony takes things seriously, they're a big company. Sony did ask me as there expert witness, what can we do to help you? And I thought well, I wanted to float my theory of independent creation by them and I said well how about who wrote the song called I Think About You? So they ended up getting around 200 songs from the Copyright Office called I think about you. The Copyright office sent me the 200 songs. So I had cassettes, CDs, sheet-music, 200 of these songs called I think about you. Out of the 200, all of them of course said I think about you. Okay that makes sense and I would expect they would at some point someone would say I think about you on one pitch with that kind of da da da da. That's a kind of normal rhythm. It worked out that almost 40 songs said I think about you on one pitch, same words, same rhythm and these people had no contact with each other. Also, one of the most common melodies is 3, 2, 1 Three Blind Mice, me ray dough. So about 20 of the songs said I think about you, I think about you, just something around 3, 2, 1. That went a long way to helping us in our case to say that not only was there no access, here you've got songs that are even closer. In fact during it, I research a lot of African music and a lot of world music and one of my favorite artists had a song that came out after the plaintiff in Texas, after her song. The two of them her I think about you in his song which is called something else, I don't remember the title, but they were so much alike melodically throughout their versus. Almost the same melody and rhythm just limited pitches 3, 2, 1, 1, and same chords to go with it. She could have had a better case against him except that it's simple materials, it's common to say I think about you with these one chord and the four chord and with those rhythms, and also he wouldn't have access to her music. She's unknown in her small town in rural Texas. She's certainly not known in Senegal. So, but that's an example of independent creation. Hopefully that gives you an idea of the importance and to consider things can be created independently. If you're writing music, you should not worry that you may have something in common with some other songs because that's the nature of language and expression.
