Years ago, I was writing with a very good friend of mine who has had three number ones. Some HUGE hits. We sat down and started working on this song that was his idea. In a couple of hours we had it finished and went our separate ways, talking about getting back together and doing a demo of it. Two days later he called me up and said "We have to stop that song, because there is song on the radio EXACTLY like it. A day or two after that, I HEARD it and it WAS exactly like it. Same melody, similar lyrics. We dumped it.

What had happened was that he had heard it and just subconciously picked it up. But what happens with pros who write a lot of songs, is we know enough to file something away if it is too much on something else. I have found myself many times finding myself on some similarity of other friend's songs or discovered some amazing song I had been working on, was something that I had picked up from the time I was 5 or 6 years old. That is the way of most of this, and why most copyrights don't even mean anything. People copyright things that are not remotely copyrightable because they just sound like a ton of other songs.

And in this day of outright samplings of EXISTING TRACKS, illegal usage of songs through YOU TUBE, FACEBOOK TWITTER and everything else, I don't know how they can ever hold up. The only time you see any of that go through anything legally is when one major artist ssues another major artist because you have to PROVE that someone defamed you of making money. You also have to prove HOW they heard your songs and the INTENT they used to take it. There are really only a dozen or so real lawsuits that have ever been proven and most of those were quite unintentional.

I sit around and hear dozens of songs even some on the radio that are direct copies of existing songs and if those don't get sued, I don't know what chance any of this other stuff is going to stand. The entire RAP hip hop genre came FROM sampling existing tracks. So I just don't get it. I was even in a bar a few weeks ago and heard a new pop song that was the ENTIRE EXACT MELODY of "HEART AND SOUL", the piano piece that everyone learns when they are six years old.

So copyright away. But if you think someone is STEALING your song, you are probably going to spend more on legal fees than you would ever gain in any lawsuit.

MAB