Obviously a witness testimony of a person being tossed into a volcano is evidence of a body, etc.

So maybe they are locking up and trying people in Europe without evidence of crimes as being committed and having people shift the burden of proof to the accused but here in the United States we really do assume that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Our courts don’t expect to waste time either. Why would they hear complaints without evidence? Why would they hear a trivial complaint?

Part of the disconnection I have in these conversations is that people skip over the legal details and want to go right to some deep philosophical discussion about originality or justice, which is fine, but also super annoying because our legal system has developed a pretty sophisticated understanding of those concepts through literal millennia of trial and error.

The current legal system works so much better than whatever I hear commonly described in these comments. If you let nerds get involved the courts would be nothing but people nitpicking over the finest of useless details in some vain attempt to score argument points, as if they’ve been trained on upvotes for decades.

There’s real wisdom in legal practice and I’m always going to lean heavily on those practices when talking about legal matters like copyright.

Originality in art is a different conversation entirely and frankly even if the courts want to view 10ms audio samples as worthy of copyright (which I’m pretty sure they would not concern themselves with), from an artistic standpoint I’m fully onboard with the idea that the musician who chopped up that sample into indistinguishable parts and then made new music is the sole author of an original work.

Ethically, copyright goes too far the moment is begins to choke the public domain and that yes, this weighs the needs of a given individual against anyone else. I’m sure the first person to record a I-IV-V progression would prefer to get a dollar every time a future composer used that but that would clearly be stifling to art in general. Copyright law in the US has evolved to capture this same ethical understanding and it’s not the only embedded wisdom.