The Notes You Don’t Play: An Empirical Analysis of the Ninth Circuit’s Filtration Problem in Music Copyright Cases

The Ninth Circuit’s approach to music copyright cases has failed to provide artists with a clear landscape of the boundaries of copyright protection for creative works. Perhaps most disconcerting is the doctrine’s lack of rigid guidance as to which elements of a composition are protected by copyright. Since the court’s controversial ruling in Williams v. Gaye, which showcased the court’s failure to differentiate between protectable and unprotectable musical elements, the literature has taken a greater interest in analyzing the effects of this muddied doctrine. In their 2019 article, Christopher Jon Sprigman and Samantha Fink Hedrick theorize how the doctrine of the Ninth Circuit creates a “filtration problem” that allows weak copyright claims to pass through the court’s analysis and expose juries to irrelevant, potentially confounding, elements of a song. However, no one has yet quantified the effects of the filtration problem. To fill this gap in the literature, this study conducts original quasi-experimental research to observe the extent to which mock jurors’ assessments of substantial similarity in musical compositions varies based on the elements included in the audio representations of compositions they listen to. Participants were randomly assigned to assess either a high-similarity song-pair or a low-similarity songpair. Within each group, different audio representations of the songs were presented, representing varying levels of filtration. Participants who listened to the most-filtered representation, the piano reduction, when assessing the low-similarity song-pair, were less likely to find similarity between the songs that those who listened to the commercial recordings. Conversely, for the high-similarity song-pair, those who heard the piano reductions were more likely to think the songs were substantially similar compared to those in the recording group. The results of this study suggest that the effectiveness of filtration depends on the relative similarities of the elements filtered and those that remain across audio representations. The piano reduction, as the most-filtered representation, appeared to be a valuable tool for highlighting protectable elements and removing irrelevant factors that could confound jurors’ assessments. Based on these findings, this Article recommends that the Ninth Circuit adopt piano reductions as the standard audio representation for compositions played in music copyright trials. By doing so, the court can mitigate the detrimental effects of the filtration problem, making it more difficult for plaintiffs with compositionally dissimilar songs to succeed on copyright claims while simultaneously strengthening the claims of musician-plaintiffs against genuine instances of copying

An Analytic and Probabilistic Approach to the Problem of Matroid Representibility

We introduce various quantities that can be defined for an arbitrary matroid, and show that certain conditions on these quantities imply that a matroid is not representable over $\mathbb{F}_q$. Mostly, for a matroid of rank $r$, we examine the proportion of size-$(r-k)$ subsets that are dependent, and give bounds, in terms of the cardinality of the matroid and $q$ a prime power, for this proportion, below which the matroid is not representable over $\mathbb{F}_q$. We also explore connections between the defined quantities and demonstrate that they can be used to prove that random matrices have high proportions of subsets of columns independent

The Notes You Don’t Play: An Empirical Analysis of the Ninth Circuit’s Filtration Problem in Music Copyright Cases

The Ninth Circuit’s approach to music copyright cases has failed to provide artists with a clear landscape of the boundaries of copyright protection for creative works. Perhaps most disconcerting is the doctrine’s lack of rigid guidance as to which elements of a composition are protected by copyright. Since the court’s controversial ruling in Williams v. Gaye, which showcased the court’s failure to differentiate between protectable and unprotectable musical elements, the literature has taken a greater interest in analyzing the effects of this muddied doctrine. In their 2019 article, Christopher Jon Sprigman and Samantha Fink Hedrick theorize how the doctrine of the Ninth Circuit creates a “filtration problem” that allows weak copyright claims to pass through the court’s analysis and expose juries to irrelevant, potentially confounding, elements of a song. However, no one has yet quantified the effects of the filtration problem. To fill this gap in the literature, this study conducts original quasi-experimental research to observe the extent to which mock jurors’ assessments of substantial similarity in musical compositions varies based on the elements included in the audio representations of compositions they listen to. Participants were randomly assigned to assess either a high-similarity song-pair or a low-similarity songpair. Within each group, different audio representations of the songs were presented, representing varying levels of filtration. Participants who listened to the most-filtered representation, the piano reduction, when assessing the low-similarity song-pair, were less likely to find similarity between the songs that those who listened to the commercial recordings. Conversely, for the high-similarity song-pair, those who heard the piano reductions were more likely to think the songs were substantially similar compared to those in the recording group. The results of this study suggest that the effectiveness of filtration depends on the relative similarities of the elements filtered and those that remain across audio representations. The piano reduction, as the most-filtered representation, appeared to be a valuable tool for highlighting protectable elements and removing irrelevant factors that could confound jurors’ assessments. Based on these findings, this Article recommends that the Ninth Circuit adopt piano reductions as the standard audio representation for compositions played in music copyright trials. By doing so, the court can mitigate the detrimental effects of the filtration problem, making it more difficult for plaintiffs with compositionally dissimilar songs to succeed on copyright claims while simultaneously strengthening the claims of musician-plaintiffs against genuine instances of copying

AFB1-AP conjugate for enzyme immunoassay of aflatoxin B1 in corn samples

This article describes the conjugation between aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), one of the major mycotoxins, and alkaline phosphatase (AP), one of the most used enzymes for immunoassays. In addition, an application of the ELISA method for aflatoxin B1 determination in corn is presented. Three AFB1-AP conjugates in different toxin-enzyme ratios were prepared and tested. The ELISA results, developed with the most effective conjugate obtained, showed a satisfactory working range between 2.4 and 4000ng of toxin/g of corn. The detection limit was 2ng/g in corn samples, and recoveries ranged from 105 to 120%

Tailoring of the self-assembled structures and optical waveguide behaviour of arylaminofluorenone derivatives

In this work, the fluorenone molecule was symmetrically difunctionalised in the 3,6-positions with four different arylamine moieties. Using slow evaporation, the four fluorenone derivatives (FO1-4) exhibit good ability to arrange into microstructures in the solid state. The electronic and steric effects of arylamine substituents influence both optical features and aggregation processes, as evidenced by photophysical and XRD characterization. SEM investigations have shown that the four FO1-4 derivatives arrange in four different microstructures. More specifically, the self-assembled 1D microribbon – shaped structure of FO1 exhibited an excellent optical loss coefficient (α) as low as 0.006 dBμm−1, suggesting a potential use of these materials in the field of optical waveguide