What if you could rewind a song - not just to hear it again, but to watch it being created, step by step?
If that sounds like a producer’s dream, it might also have been a litigator’s dream in one of the most controversial copyright cases of the last decade: Marvin Gaye Estate v. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, better known as the Blurred Lines case.
On its face, the dispute was familiar territory. The estate of Marvin Gaye alleged that Blurred Lines infringed the copyright in Got to Give It Up. The defendants did not deny that they had been influenced by Gaye’s work - indeed, they openly acknowledged inspiration. But in copyright law, inspiration is not infringement. The real question was whether the defendants had copied protected expression, or whether they had independently created something new.
That distinction matters enormously, because independent creation is a complete defence against claims of copyright infringement. Two works can be strikingly similar, yet co-exist entirely lawfully, if they were created without copying.
The difficulty lies not in the doctrine, but in the proof. Courts generally infer copying through a combination of similarity and access, and once that inference is drawn, the burden, practically speaking, shifts to the defendant to explain how the work came into being.
In Blurred Lines, the jury ultimately found against Thicke and Williams. They concluded that the similarities, taken together with evidence of access, pointed to copying. The result was substantial damages and adecision that continues to divide opinion across the creative industries.
What is striking, with the benefit of hindsight, is how much turned on the absence of a robust, objective record of the creative process.
The defence relied heavily on testimony and retrospective explanation: how the song was composed, what influenced it, and what did not. That kind of evidence can be persuasive, but it is also inherently weak and vulnerable. Memories can be challenged. Narratives can be contested. Juries (or judges) are left to choose between competing stories.
If you “hate these blurred lines”, now consider how the case might have looked if a system like Etched had been in place.
Instead of reconstructing the creative process after the fact, the defendants could have produced a contemporaneous, tamper‑evident timeline of the song’s development. Early drafts. Iterative changes. Separate contributions. The evolution of rhythm, melody, and structure. Crucially, all of it time-stamped and preserved as it happened - not curated later for litigation.
Such a record would not guarantee a different outcome. But it would materially alter the evidential landscape. Rather than asking a jury to infer what might have happened, it would allow them to see what did happen.
The question would shift from “does this sound similar?” to“does this look like copying?”
And that distinction matters. Because, as we say, similarity on its own is not unlawful. Copying is.
As copyright disputes increasingly intersect with fast, iterative creative technologies - including AI - the importance of process evidence will only grow. Courts will continue to rely on inferences where direct evidence is lacking. But detailed audit trails make inferences redundant. And for creators – who never know when a complaint might be thrown at them – that’s a big deal.
In copyright law, outcomes often turn not on abstract principles, but on what can, and cannot, be proven about how a work came into being. Not on Blurred Lines, but on evidence Etched in time.
