I watched a video where he demonstrated that many songs use the same tune / Chord progression (?). What is chord progression and why was the one in question essentially uncopyrightable?
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Court cases based on chord progressions are super common. Most of them fail, because as others here have already noted, there just aren’t that many ways to combine the 12 musical notes.
Finding that a chord progression is someone’s intellectual property would basically make it impossible for people to make new music.
A good example can be found if you look up “[Pachelbel’s progression](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon)”, a chord progression found in / popularized by Pachelbel’s Canon in D major.
If Pachelbel had sued everyone that used it after him and won, and it became an intellectual property asset someone could own in perpetuity, the list of songs that wouldn’t exist in the form we currently know would be huge.
It is possible to successfully sue another artist for plagiarizing your music – there are cases where that happens and the court finds in favor of the claimant. But for that to happen, you generally have to be claiming intellectual property rights over something more unique to your work and that wouldn’t absolutely cripple the industry if you won.
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