Spotify Patents A Tool To Help Prevent Songwriter Plagiarism

Given that there are only so many notes in music, it is possible that some songs could end up sounding similar to each other. In some instances, this has led to accusations of plagiarism which could get ugly real fast and cost a lot of money. To help musicians avoid this problem, it seems that Spotify has created a tool that can deal with that.

According to a report from MBW, they have discovered a patent filed by Spotify in which it details an anti-plagiarism tool that musicians can use to double check if their works are similar to others out there. It works like how you might expect, where musicians can submit their lead sheets into the system which will then be cross-checked against other lead sheets out there to check for similarities.

In a way, this sounds similar to other tools that colleges and universities use to check whether or not student-submitted work is plagiarized. This will be extremely helpful for musicians who’d rather not step on any toes or who might not have the funds to fight a legal battle, especially if they’re going up against a huge record label or publisher.

That being said, this is currently a patent and there’s no telling if and when Spotify does plan to launch such a tool. However, if they do, it could encourage more musicians to use Spotify to launch their music on.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Audio, General
Tags: Entertainment, Legal, Music, Patent, Spotify