It just doesn't make sense why he thought it was important to license the music to transform to 8-bits, but not license the art to transform to 8 bits.
The examples he gave of what he thought was equivalent were not close to equivalent of what he did (his friend did). The Pulitzer example was obviously its own piece of art inspired by the original. His was a flat copy that was transformed to 8 bits.
Because he didn't license the recording, he licensed the score. That's well-established; there are multiple rights in a piece of recorded music (the score, the lyrics and the mechanical rights to name three).
So you can have multiple rights here. Clearing the rights to the score is easy - if the composer is ASCAP/BMI/PRS/GEMA (etc) then there's a standard license they've agreed to, so you pay your royalties and you're away. Mechanicals and lyrics can be a bit more complex when you start creating transformative works (ie sampling, rewriting words, etc.)
It seems to me you could have a huge explosion of creative work if the type of compulsory license that exists for musical scores could be applied to, well, pretty much everything under copyright.
The losers, of course, would be copyright lawyers and the artistes that want complete control over their work even after it's published.
It totally makes sense – he thought he was creating a transformative work. The score is identical in both cases, therefore you need a license. The analogy would be if you had a score that was inspired by, but transformed from, the original.
(As I understand it, and I could be wrong about this: the cover isn't the original photo run through a transform; it's a pixel art recreation. A better analogy would be the companies who replay samples to evade mechanical rights - http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...).
Technically speaking, the score isn't identical, judging by the bits I heard. But the melody lines certainly were, and that's all you need to trigger the need to license the music.
Yep. In fact, I'm fairly sure harmonies aren't protectable, just the top line, hence all the contrafacts (same chords, so same solos, but different themes) in jazz. There are hundreds of tunes on the Coltrane or Rhythm changes.
Rhythms aren't either, or James Brown, the Winstons, or Sly and Robbie and their billion reggae ridfims would be the richest musicians in the world...
The examples he gave of what he thought was equivalent were not close to equivalent of what he did (his friend did). The Pulitzer example was obviously its own piece of art inspired by the original. His was a flat copy that was transformed to 8 bits.