Ben Sisario, The New York Times; When Songs Sound Similar, Courts Look for Musical DNA
"But are they close enough that Sheeran should be liable for copyright infringement? Or is their overlap limited to fundamental musical building blocks that are part of the public domain?"...
“All of these cases are about the question of how similar is too similar,” said Joseph P. Fishman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville. “The Copyright Act that Congress passed says nothing whatsoever about that question. In the U.S. copyright system, the rules for how that question gets answered are entirely developed by federal judges.”"
