Blog Post 1- Road to Research

Figuring out my research project was a bit of a process. In the beginning, I knew that I wanted to do something involved with music since it is something I am passionate about. At first, I wanted to do something involving autotune and the amount of autotune in different songs for various projects. However, I concluded that figuring out the amount of autotune in songs was going to be almost impossible. This realization caused me to shift my project completely. I knew that I wanted to continue along the music pathway so I brainstormed different ideas involving music. That's when I remembered that there were a lot of different copyright court cases in the music industry including some pretty popular artists. Some of the most recent court cases include artists such as Mariah Carey and Ed Sheeran. This caused me to look into that idea and eventually, I came up with my current project and question.

After figuring out the topic for my research project, How Have Copyright Cases in the Music Industry Evolved Over Time?, I had to come up with a methodology to conduct the project. Based on research that I did, I found out what Copyright infringement is and what most copyright cases in the music industry are based on. First of all, copyright infringement is “...when a copyrighted work is reproduced, distributed, performed, publicly displayed, or made into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner.” (US Copyright Office). Also, I found out that copyright in the music industry is different from other forms of media such as books or movies. In those other forms, words are the only thing copyrighted, but in music, the lyrics and the production can also be copyrighted. In addition to figuring out that music copyrights the production and lyrics in songs, I found out that usually, it's the lyrics, harmonies, melodies, rhythms, and tone that are getting sued for the violation of copyright music. I found out some background on what copyright was in the music industry and then needed to research ways to find all of the court cases that exist. I ended up finding a website that included all of the copyright infringement cases from the 1800's - 2020s in order. I found this as a convenient way to collect the information needed to analyze different patterns. At first, I was going to choose 5 cases from each decade starting from the 1980's, when the amount of copyright infringement cases started increasing, but after talking to others, they suggested that I look at all of the cases on the website.

Once I was done researching the different court cases and collecting information, I planned on putting that information in a spreadsheet to make it more organized and easier to analyze information. I am planning to analyze different components of the court cases and compare them to find patterns. Some of the different components that I plan to analyze are the rulings of the case as well as the gender, race, ethnicity, and age of the different sides, and the consequences the violations caused.

All photos shown are from the WIX Website and stock images