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Even massive songs rarely go into litigation. The cost to BOTH sides is often way more than any hope of compensation o profit in the end. The few cases that DO go anywhere are so rare we can often list most of them in a conversation. I have multiple songs in my own catalog which are 100% identical in melody or major portions of choruses. But the idea of suing someone for infringement is silly. In most cases it isn't infringement that causes the duplication, it is being a human in the same world and processing them same info and influences and spitting out the same melody or lyrics or both. I think in 99%+ of cases, copyright is pointless and frankly doesn't serve society. Sure, VERY rare exceptions exist, but the way we use copyright today is ineffective to reality. Often it blocks creativity and the advance of beneficial technology, services and artistic growth by the masses. Any given melody you come up with has already been done many times by others in such a wide variance of contexts that plucking one such "infringement" and suing seems silly to me. I have melodies, like you must have, that have shown up years later in hit songs. It happens naturally and without ill intent all the time. Often cases get tossed out because even when a true theft occurs, it is often EASY to go back and prove that the party who was infringed up had also infringed on the same song many other previous commercial releases. There are only 12 notes. Even with the vast ways they can be combined, so many songs have been written by so many people, every combination has been used countless times. I don't have the answer for exactly what to do about it, but I think changes should be considered. Machines can and will now produce every possible combination and then mechanically reproduce it over and over and over. Go and listen to John Williams theme for Star Wars and realize he directly copied a classical composer note for note. Yet he has sued others for infringing on "his" work.