Brian appeared on NPR's All Things Considered to touch upon the "Stairway To Heaven" vs. "Taurus" case, one of the most interesting and captivating cases in the past couple of decades. In terms of music copyright law, this case spotlighted the Copyright Act of 1909, deposit copies, and the soon to be abandoned, Inverse Ratio Rule.​
For the last episode of Courthouse News Reporter's podcast season, Brian was interviewed about the some of the recent high-profile cases, such as Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud vs Let's Get It On, where Josh Russell was in the courtroom, and the massive ongoing case in which Steely and Clevie are essentially suing all Reggaeton artists, including Bad Bunny and Daddy Yankee, where the dispute (in my opinion ridiculous) is around whether you can copyright a rhythm such as the one that perhaps appeared first in Steely and Clevie's Fish Market -- the "dembow" riddim -- and which is unquestionably ubiquitous across Reggaeton.
Brian L. Frye, Spears-Gilbert Associate Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College, hosts this legal scholarship podcast, and in this episode, Brian McBrearty explains what forensic musicologists do and how they analyze music. He describes how he became a forensic musicologist and how forensic musicologists approach the analysis of songs as expert witnesses in copyright infringement litigation. And he specifically reflects on recent copyright infringement cases involving Marvin Gaye songs.
Rita Anwiri Chindah invited Brian to appear on the IP Series Podcast. Chinha is an Intellectual Property (IP) and Information Technology (IT) lawyer from Nigeria and was recently listed in the 2020 WIPR Influential Women in IP Trailblazer!
We discuss how to prove or disprove that a song is copied from another? How I approach measuring the similarity between two pieces of music? My role as a forensic musicologist and how it can help artists and lawyers and the courts in cases of alleged musical plagiarism or infringement of copyright through identifying the objective and subjective similarities and differences between one musical work and an allegedly or potentially infringing work.