Music Business Worldwide reports that Spotify has filed an artificial intelligence patent in Europe “that includes proposed plans for a new plagiarism detection tool that will allow songwriters to avoid legal action for songwriting plagiarism.”
The patent currently goes under the name of “Plagiarism Risk Detector And Interface.”
It is a technology that will allow a song lead sheet (featuring melody, chords, lyrics, and additional notes) to be put through their ‘plagiarism detector’ that would then compare the song in question to the other compositions in its database after “having been trained on a plurality of preexisting encoded lead sheets.”
The technology would then give feedback including a description of plagiarism detected (taking chord sequence, melodic fragments, harmonies, and more into account) as well as a similarity value based on comparisons to other compositions in its database. Spotify’s new tool would also work the opposite way, notifying songwriters/artists if their melody is completely new/unlike anything in its database.
According to Spotify’s explanation that accompanies the filing, “such a tool would allow artists to generate lead sheets more quickly and confidently by detecting and providing visual feedback as to whether any aspect of the work has a probability of being deemed plagiaristic.”
Supposedly, Spotify claims that its tool will be “more intuitive” and “more precise” than other proposed/existing technologies, including the Music Plagiarism Detection System and the Audio Forensics Meets Music Information Retrieval – A Toolbox For Inspection Of Music Plagiarism.
