Music law questions: If not on Music then where?

Question

Music: Practice and Theory is not for legal questions. Yet some other Stack Exchange sites allow topics about legal aspects of the site's subject, so long as the questions seek not "legal advice" but instead general legal information. (There's a difference.) Tags with such questions include the following:

• licensing on Programmers
• legal, licensing, and font-licensing on Graphic Design
• legal, contracts, and commercial-photography on Photography.

So on which other site should people instead ask questions that seek general information about laws that apply to songwriters and composers throughout the set of countries that have ratified the Berne Convention? Example below. Must I wait several months for a couple hundred more people to commit to the Law proposal? Is there a place to ask this even outside the Stack Exchange Network that doesn't require spending hundreds of dollars?

What steps should a new songwriter take to avoid accidentally plagiarizing/infringing?

Copyright infringement cases have been won on as few as eight notes when those eight are the "hook" (the portion of a melody central to a piece of music). But there exist only a finite number of distinct melodies of that length:

• A note's duration (time from its onset to that of the next) can be short or long, relative to the overall rhythm of a piece.
• The interval from one note to the next can be one of the seven scale degrees, modulo octaves.
• The last note has no next note therefore no duration or interval.

Thus there are 14 possibilities for each note other than the last, and 14^{8 - 1} is just over 105 million. This number appears to be low enough that a collision with at least one of the millions of songs in the ASCAP and BMI repertories (source: BMI's web site) is statistically a real danger. Unintentional copying is no excuse; George Harrison lost a million dollar lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord" (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music).

So how do songwriters typically protect themselves from being bankrupted by lawsuits? Are there any proactive ways to avoid copying in the first place?

Answer 1

Legal questions are not on-topic anywhere on Stack Exchange, because you should consult a lawyer whenever you have any legal questions.

In fact, there were previously three Law proposals on Area 51 that were explicitly closed down on 2012-05-07 because Stack Exchange is not at all interested in hosting such content. Allowing users to give legal advice just opens up the user and Stack Exchange to legal actions against them, and they don't want that happen.

There is a very vague line between just "asking about the law" and "asking for legal advice" because laws are not very clear-cut and straight-forward. Actual laws are very verbose and have to be interpreted correctly, which is why it's generally advised that only a lawyer interpret a law for you.

I wouldn't depend on the current Law proposal on Area 51 making it anywhere either. Looking at some example questions, I imagine it too will be closed down before it reaches beta (or possibly after the private beta if it does make it that far) - for the very reason outlined above.