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Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Of Bass Notes And Base Rates: Avoiding Mistaken Inferences About Copying, Christopher Buccafusco, Rebecca Tushnet
Faculty Scholarship
To prove copyright infringement, a plaintiff must convince a jury that the defendant copied from the plaintiff’s work rather than independently creating it. To prove copying, especially cases involving music, it’s common for plaintiffs and their experts to argue that the similarities between the parties’ creative works are so great that it is simply implausible that the defendant’s work was created without copying from the plaintiff’s work. Unfortunately, in its present form, the argument is mathematically illiterate: It assumes, without any underlying evidence, that the experts know or could reasonably estimate how likely it is that a song with similarity …