Professor Maggie Livingston’s article "Copyright Infringement of Music: Determining Whether What Sounds Alike is Alike," 15 Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L. 227 (2013) (co-authored with J. Urbinato), was selected for republication in the 2013 edition of Entertainment, Publishing and the Arts Handbook, as one of the best law review articles in the fields of entertainment, publishing and the arts published within the last year. Professor Livingston co-authored the article with Dr. Joseph Urbinato, professor emeritus of music history, music theory and bassoon, Roosevelt University.
"I wanted to write about this topic because music is somewhat different from other art forms, such as literary works and works of visual art, in that there are only a limited number of ways to arrange the traditional scale of notes to produce a work that will be pleasing to the Western ear," said Professor Livingston. "Because the standard for copyright infringement requires the plaintiff to show that the defendant's work is substantially similar to the plaintiff's, one faces the difficulty of determining whether a defendant truly plagiarized the plaintiff's composition or merely drew upon common public domain antecedents and genre conventions to produce a similar (but not plagiarized) piece of music."
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