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The story
The Supreme Court has finalized a damages order against the operating company of a free website that had been publishing imitations of “band scores” (sheet-music arrangements for bands) produced by a publisher. According to NHK, the key issue wasn’t copyright infringement but whether the act amounted to a tort under Article 709 of the Civil Code, with the focus on how the site had, over a long period, copied numerous songs down to the smallest detail and stolen away the publisher’s customers. On the thread, questions piled up one after another — “Doesn’t a band score even have copyright?” and “What’s the difference between transcribing by ear and a flat-out copy?” — and opinions split over how far creative works unprotected by copyright should be shielded.
Band Score Imitated and Published for Free: Damages Order Finalized by Supreme Court
October 9, 2026, 18:40
(Updated October 9, 2026, 19:21)
Source: news.web.nhk / Original article here
What people said
Write something interesting for once.
Clay in a horse's ear (a garbled twist on "a sutra in a horse's ear" — preaching to deaf ears)
Mackerel for a cat (a twist on "a gold coin for a cat" — wasted on someone who won't appreciate it)
Vested interests come first
The decline of future technology
It's exactly the kind of thing AI's best at
There's already a ton of commercial software that transcribes sheet music lol. Guess the problem is posting it straight to a website?
It already exists.
Also, sheet music isn't music itself —
it's a relic from an era when it was the only way to convey music outside the moment of performance.
Precisely because notation alone can't reproduce the music,
there's musical education built around reproducing it.
"Conservatoire" means "preservation" —
they teach so the same performance can be reproduced.
A music preservation society, basically.
That skill can't be written down in notation.
But since recordings came along, you can preserve the thing itself.
So sheet music
is only useful to someone who has learned the skill of turning notation back into music.
This guy legitimately bought the published sheet music, then copy-pasted it onto his own affiliate site.
On top of that, he openly admitted to copying it, claiming that once he'd bought it he could do whatever he wanted with it.
So the publisher sued him.
No matter how you look at it, that's gotta be auto-generated lol
That's not even transcribing by ear then
Stop making up random nonsense
That way of thinking is old-fashioned too.
You can do anything.
What's "appropriate" is up to whoever's doing it.
The "preservation society" just retroactively compiled a "this is how people used to do it" story.
In Spanish music, what even counts as the dominant is anyone's guess.
That whole framework is just Western church music.
Even in the West, folk traditions do whatever they want.
Talk of the church being superior, or music schools, or "art" — that's all just vested interests talking.
It's Salieri sniping at Mozart.
Music isn't about making sheet music.
The thing is, this publisher's sheet music was transcribed by someone with real musical knowledge,
so if you play it exactly as written, it actually sounds like a proper band.
And this guy just freeloaded off that and copied it wholesale. Speaking of freeloading, there's way too much of that going around these days too — YouTube, video sites, you name it.
Unlike a judge who's just doing this as a day job, the people filing the suit literally have their livelihood on the line.
It's all about vested interests, not livelihoods.
They rip off other people's stuff while trying to protect their own.
You're misunderstanding this.
This case was treated as essentially posting the exact contents of a published book.
I don't know the actual details,
but the court's point was that it amounted to reproducing the book.
Posting tabs isn't copying the music itself,
and it isn't copying a book either.
There's no guarantee the music is even played the way the tab shows anyway.
Score House's stuff was still decent, at least.
Some of those were transcribed by people who clearly hadn't had any musical training.
The Larry Carlton one was especially bad — both the notes and the tab were full of mistakes.
"It doesn't violate copyright law, but it caused harm through an unfair act."
And the basis for calling it unfair is… Article 709.
That means you can't predict the scope of the law in advance.
What a foolish judge.
Who is it?
This is judiciary working purely for vested interests.
This isn't a nation governed by the rule of law, is it.
That's actually the easy way to do it these days.
You can slow it down as much as you like
and just line up notes going "maybe this one, maybe that one."
whether it was independently transcribed by ear the same way, or just a straight-up copy.
A book's copyright protects its outward form.
Yeah, it's confusing.
The argument is that this way you can't even compete.
If "it's free" is an excuse, then what does that make open source?
But then again, the original music is commercial — it belongs to someone else, after all.
Presiding Judge Mamoru Miura issued a first-of-its-kind ruling stating that "when using something that isn't a copyrighted work, like a band score, if it goes beyond the bounds of free competition and infringes on business interests, it constitutes a tort."
On that basis, the court found that the website operator's conduct had "copied numerous songs down to the smallest detail over a long period, stealing away customers."
Right, that's the interpretation.
Copyright can be interpreted all sorts of ways,
but here they're saying this isn't copyright —
it's business interference.
But if new analysis/transcription was involved, that'd be a new work,
and if it's a new work, you can't really say it's interfering with someone's business.
That's the shaky part.
That makes no sense to me.
Isn't the copyright held by the composer?
What's protected is the songwriting/composition.
Arrangement isn't.
In classical music, everything counts as composition,
but a band arrangement isn't protected as music,
so a band score isn't protected as music either.
So if it comes down to whether it counts as reproducing a copyrighted work, that'd be copyright at the level of the book itself.
But apparently this case wasn't even that.
The copyright does belong to the composer.
Both the plaintiff and defendant in this case are different people from the composer.
It's a case where the person who transcribed the sheet music sued the person who copied that sheet music, for damages.
even pay licensing fees or royalties to the original songwriter?
Suing someone for copying a copy, basically.
If they're publishing it as an actual book, they must already be doing that.
If they weren't, the publisher wouldn't be able to stay in business.
It'd affect everything else too.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
A band score is a collection of sheet music transcribed and arranged from commercially released songs, and because it isn’t the songwriting/composition itself, it has long been treated as falling outside copyright protection. In this ruling, the Supreme Court held for the first time — separately from copyright — that an act of copying numerous songs down to the smallest detail over a long, organized period, thereby stealing away customers, goes beyond the bounds of free competition and constitutes a tort under Article 709 of the Civil Code. What split opinion on the thread was where the line falls between independently transcribing by ear and simply reproducing an existing score outright. The article alone doesn’t reveal the specific transcription methods used by either the plaintiff or the defendant, nor is it clear how far this ruling might extend to other sheet-music services, such as overseas tab sites. It’s easy to mistake this for a copyright infringement ruling, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this is actually a tort claim built on a legal basis separate from copyright.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geino/Sports News+) thread “[Music] Band Score Imitated, Published for Free: Damages Order Finalized by Supreme Court.”
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