To me, there seems to be a correlation between these recent law suits and failing music sales. Stolen songs or parts of songs has been around forever. And back In the day, there was only a small handful of cases, nowadays they are brought to attention all the time.

Is it because the artists are not making the same money they used to on recorded music, so any chance they get to collect, they do it?

And maybe when they were making the money off of recorded music, they didn't care if others copied them?

* I still think that copyrights are important.

For me, why bother writing a song if you can't prove you wrote it? Why bother, just record covers in that case.

The system of copyrights needs to be fixed, but I think we still need them

Ed Sheeran was sued for 20 million for this copycat. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L3YFOaLiUsY,

he was also sued by Marvin Gaye's estate for this,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Gd1I3DmEd4

Tom petty has been stolen from many many times, and only until recently has he given a damn
http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/tom-petty-sam-smith-plagiarism.html