There are a few different components of music, but I think this is most relevant to melody. Melodies are the often-repeating sequences of notes that make up songs. The guitar bit from the Rolling Stone’s ‘Satisfaction’, the chorus to the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’, the guitar solo in ‘Stairway to Heaven’, all of it is melody (I’m going to use a lot of classic rock examples in this article, as I think it’s a genre a lot of people are familiar with, and it’s good music). Really all the guitar bits, verses, choruses, and solos are melody. Alongside rhythm and timbre, melody is basically what music is.

Copyright gives people a monopoly on the melodies in their songs. The Beatles own the melodies in ‘Yellow Submarine’, and they have a legal right to control their use. We don’t think about it a lot, but owning a copyright actually gives you a right to censor – if someone uses your melody in a song, you have the right to block that song from being played. In the real world it usually just works out that the offender has to pay a % of their profits, but legally a song can be silenced. These days it could still end up on Pirate Bay, but that’s another story.

There are some exceptions to this, one of the biggest being that you don’t need permission to record your own version of other people’s songs (a ‘cover’ song). That’s because there is something called ‘compulsory licensing’ for covers, which is exactly what it sounds like – it’s compulsory to give a license. Nobody can legally stop you if you want to do your own version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, you just basically have to pay about 10 cents per copy you sell.

You can’t change a cover around very much – if you want to change the lyrics, for example, you need the copyright owner’s permission. Otherwise we would be hearing ‘The Rhythm of the Right’ and ‘Alt-Right Now’ at campaign rallies. Even translations require permission, although you can import songs into different genres – doing bluegrass or lounge or punk versions seem to be fine. It’s kind of a funny thing – covers are allowed, but you can be blocked if you want to use the main ‘Satisfaction’ riff as part of a completely different song, or even just do hip-hop over a 3 second loop of the drum track (a ‘sample’).

There are obviously a lot of good reasons why our copyright laws work the way they do. I’m sure you already know the logic by which copyright allows musicians to make money, and artists deserve to be paid. We don’t want giant villain-studios stealing the best songs from all the little garage bands and putting out super-processed versions of them across the radio with subtle political messages.

What’s fair aside, musicians would probably still make music without copyright. But it probably wouldn’t be as good, and the quality of recorded music in particular would be expected to suffer drastically. Recordings wouldn’t serve much of an economic purpose beyond advertising live shows. And it goes beyond the economic. Having a copyright means that what artists create is theirs – they have control over it, where and how it is used, how it is packaged and sold, what different versions are released, everything.

But at the same time copyright is taking something from the intellectual world, and walling it off into the legal entity that is a song. I’m not going to say that these melodies people own are the building blocks of music. But I don’t know if each melody is a unique thing that should only exist in the one original song it was first used in. Do musicians invent new melodies, or are they just discovering them?