Plagiarism of Music

The German online news magazine for IT, netzwelt, reports that
Daniel Müllensiefen, from the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College in London and Marc Pendzich, a Hamburg-based musicologist who did his dissertation on cover versions, have developed a software for determining if specific music is a plagiarism. They have tested their algorithms on a number of court decisions about musical plagiarism:

Müllensiefen, D., and Pendzich, M. (2009). Court decisions on music plagiarism and the predictive value of similarity algorithms. Musicae Scientiae, Discussion Forum 4B, 257-295.

The duo runs a company that sells expertise in the area of musical plagiarism.

Identification of Music Plagiarism

markenbusiness reports on a case of itunes being able to identify a purported music plagiarism. Since iTunes uses a signature of the music to identify the performer, a download of one piece suggested it was done by someone else. And since from both the music is digitally identical in the wave forms, something fishy is up.

Of course, it could just be a database error, with the same musical signature stored for both performers. But since one pianist is involved in numerous such pieces, an investigation is being conducted.