This blog post was sparked by a quote from Brian’s blog post: “I have thought about this before. What if in 3000 years, every single possible combination of musical notes has been put together, so there would not be any more original music. What would copyright laws do then?”

At my high school, once a year, we put on a Coffeehouse Show-where people would perform short skits, or songs of whatever kind. One year, some students got up and began singing individual songs, but what was interesting about them was that they all had had the same basic 4 chords to them, much like in this video. In the music world, this does not seem to violate copyright laws. For example in the video, Journey is not given credit for the songs made after it that include the same 4 chords as it uses. However, in the writing world, one can not just take others’ words and get away with it. Each of the songs, although they incorporate the same four chords, are all given credit to be original works. I wonder why this works the way it does?