Changing the laws to allow compulsory licensing would probably direct us towards a culture that was more friendly to reuse. There might be some pushback to start, but in the end people would be writing good new songs with old melodies, and I assume it would become more acceptable.

Maybe it could even make cross-cultural pollination more acceptable as well. Aside from music made by Afrodescendant people, there seems to be a slight taboo against using melodic patterns from cultures outside your own. Cultural appropriation is just one side of the coin, there’s also cultural monopolization. As it stands whole groups of musical patterns do seem to be strongly associated with particular ethnicities. Just not being able to change lyrics can make it harder to do covers of songs in foreign languages.

Even if the ball got rolling for something like that, it would still be an opt-in system, however. So a lot of the best melodies might still not be available. While I generally think opt-in systems are much more feasible and realistic, people do tend not to opt-in.

I feel like there’s a risk of us going in a bad direction in general for those things. If you want access to the full buffet of TV and movies, you have to get a subscription to Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and even then that doesn’t cover everything. We could have compulsory licensing for news stories, academic journals, any number of things. Canada used to have compulsory licensing for pharmaceutical drugs, for example. Companies could manufacture generic versions of drugs that were still under patent, they just had to pay royalties. Don’t necessarily expect the above-mentioned industries to go out and campaign for compulsory licensing, though.

Those are examples of compulsory licensing for end products. Taking it still another direction, how about a legal right to remake and market documentaries with extra scenes added? People could comment on anything they might feel needed clearing up. There could be a whole aisle in the bookstore dedicated to new versions of Harry Potter with different endings, you could download extra levels for all your favorite video games.

Some of that is probably going a little too far. It’s certainly veering further and further off topic. The arguments I have been making here are about something very specific, the legal right to reuse melodies from existing songs. Melody is something unique, it doesn’t have a lot of direct parallels. As it stands you can legally write novels about debonair British Secret agents fighting supervillains in ways that you just can’t reuse the ‘Seven Nation Army’ riff.