[MUSIC PLAYING]
My advice usually is to be very careful about thinking
that someone has copied your music.
It's quite a heavy, serious accusation.
And conversely, if someone is to accuse you of it, it's serious.
It's something that you have to pay attention to.
It's federal law.
There are three levels of court, all of them are federal.
First is what is called district court.
There are 94 districts in the United States.
I'm sitting in Nashville right now.
In Tennessee, there are three districts.
This is the middle district of Tennessee.
Obviously, a lot of copyright issues come here.
The three places where you see most copyright issues are
New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville.
But so you could have a lawsuit here, in district court.
The person who loses that case can then appeal it to what's
called the circuit court.
There are 11 circuits.
And Nashville is in the sixth circuit.
Boston is in the first.
New York is in the second circuit.
California is the ninth circuit.
So you would appeal it to the circuit court.
And then, the next step after that is, really, the Supreme Court.
So when you're in a copyright case, you're only two steps away
from the Supreme Court.
It begins at that fairly high level.
Also, it's very expensive.
Lawyers get paid anywhere from $200 an hour, on the low end, $300 to $400 now
might be more common.
I'm dealing with lawyers now who are getting paid over $800 an hour.
They usually hire expert witnesses, someone like me
who is a musicologist, who can give the lawyer the advice the lawyer needs
about the originality of the musical expression.
Because that's what this comes down to.
Did you copy original expression?
You can copying small phrases and things that aren't original.
But if you copy original expression, it becomes more serious.
And it's a sliding scale.
What does it mean to be original?
You can't look it up in a book and say, oh, these seven words, this is--
and these four words are not.
It's a case by case basis.
So the person in my role gets paid a lot of money as well.
And these cases can go for a long time.
A short case might be two years.
I've been in some that went for 10 years.
In fact, it worked this way.
It was a Friday.
I was in Nashville, about to fly to New York.
The trial began Monday in New York.
I was getting on the plane and I get a call.
Get off the plane, we settled.
So things can work that way.
But if you have 10 years to devote to this
and there are motions back and forth, it's something you want to avoid.
There's always ways to work things out.
You don't want to go to a trial.
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