This week, the whole internet gave a roaring cheer 'cos Robin Thicke seemed to get his comeuppance, ordered to pay $7.3million USD for ripping off Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give It Up' along with his pal Pharrell Williams. 

Folks are real stoked about this primarily, it's obvious, because they've got a personal distaste for Robin Thicke and one of the songs at the centre of this scandal. When 'Blurred Lines' came out it was decried as a rape anthem (on a pretty dubious but widespread interpretation of the song) and was accompanied by some blatant objectification in the form of its music video. Whether you believe 'Blurred Lines' is "rapey" or not, Thicke still carried out a campaign of public harassment towards his just-divorced ex-wife Paula Patton. Dude's a creep, you can have that one. 

But even if you're satisfied that Thicke got slapped upside the head by The Law, nobody who loves music should be happy about the outcome of this lawsuit, because it doesn't just concern a leery pop artist, it concerns THE FUTURE OF MUSIC itself. Nah, really! And it all comes down to how the result was reached.

How do you measure plagiarism in music? Plenty of people are upset that a lot of pop music sounds the same. Pop songs, especially when they're by the same production team, often use the same structures to appeal to as many people as possible. These haven't changed all that much over the past hundred years. There are a few musical structures which just sound good to human ears, and a capable producer will take advantage of that fact. According to the New York Times, during the 'Blurred Lines' case, musicologists agonised over passages even as short as four notes to demonstrate that it had ripped off Marvin Gaye's 'Got To Give It Up', but as wonderful medleys like the Axis of Awesome's 'Four Chord Song' and Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant' demonstrate, hundreds of songs have used virtually identical passages just that short to build entire songs.

This is the basis of pop music and as people who grow up around music, it becomes part of our DNA from an early age. That Pharrell would've grown up with Marvin Gaye seems obvious, but for it to be plagiarism, the prosecution should've had to prove that Pharrell wrote the song with the intent to copy Gaye. Questlove said all that should've needed saying way back in 2013:

Look, technically it's not plagiarized. It's not the same chord progression. It's a feeling. Because there's a cowbell in it and a Fender Rhodes as the main instrumentation — that still doesn't make it plagiarized. We all know it's derivative. That's how Pharrell works. Everything that Pharrell produces is derivative of another song — but it's a homage.

Where we land now is a world in which anyone who accidentally mimics a previous song to some arbitrary standard can be sued for plagiarism. This is a dangerous precedent and the absurdity of it has already been pointed out all over the web. 

On Reddit, users illustrated who should be calling up their lawyers against who. The Time should be suiting up against Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson because 'Uptown Funk' is too similar to 'Jungle Love'. Phish could see Meghan Trainor over 'All About That Bass' sounding too close to 'Contact'. Green Day have apparently ripped off every song of their career. Jimmy Eat World could sue Kelly Clarkson because 'Heartbeat Song' sounds too much like 'The Middle'. Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' also bears resemblance to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Maps' as demonstrated by Ted Leo.

Music naturally builds on the past, and if it were forced to explore absolute originality, it'd get stuck in a horrible rut of experimental jazz. Do you want everything to sound like experimental jazz? Good lord, we're staring at the worst of all possible futures.

Michaelangelo Matos, one of America's finest music journalists, points out one possible and oft-cited solution: reform copyright. The protection artists have over their intellectual property is necessary to an extent - of course an artist deserves to get paid for their work - but the laws we have now make too much room for lawsuits like this 'Blurred Lines' debacle, in which long dead artists are preventing newer ones from refreshing their work and creating something new and exciting by building on the established legacies of music. 

There's no debating that 'Blurred Lines' sounds similar to 'Got To Give It Up', but barring conscious intent to rip it off, that shouldn't really matter. Music has been remixed, mashed up, built upon, and inspired by other music for as long as it's existed, and we've got plenty of incredible songs to show for it. That the smallest components of those songs are now being imprisoned by copyright, potentially forever, is frightening. Given how many millions of singles it sold, and how many millions of people it resonated with, there has to be a better way.