Law professor incorporates musical ability into study of intellectual property law

Lauren Wilson, a new faculty member in the School of Law, specializes in intellectual property and property law. She’s also an accomplished musician, majoring in classical guitar performance as an undergraduate and teaching music theory and ear training courses at the Eastman School of Music, where she earned a PhD in music theory.

So it makes perfect sense for her to blend her expertise. Wilson calls on her knowledge of music and performance to draw unique insights into the way copyright law is applied to music and how historically out of touch those well-meaning attempts at application have become.

“There is some kind of disconnect among how musicians, the public and the law each think about music,” says Wilson, associate professor of law.

“The cases are fixated on protecting things that were historically thought of as creatively important in music: melody, harmony and rhythm. Today, though, that’s not where the creativity is focused.”

Using her knowledge of music theory, Wilson has written and published on copyright law and musical “borrowing.” Targeting melody, harmony and rhythm — all front and center in the well-known copyright infringement case against singer Ed Sheeran, who was accused of copying elements of the Marvin Gaye classic “Let’s Get It On” — isn’t entirely fair, she says, because musicians have always borrowed basic chord progressions and melodic fragments from a commonly held vocabulary.

“Today’s popular musical production is more based in lacing familiar concepts together, stacking them on top of each other, and in the techniques producers in the studio are using to bring things to life and to create new sounds, using different instruments or different mixing techniques,” she explains.

Consequentially, these commonly used chord progressions, melodies and rhythms get over-protected by dated interpretations of copyright law, according to Wilson. Musicians have been using these standard chord-and-melody patterns for hundreds of years, and they weren’t created by any one author. Targeting these commonly used musical themes and accusing musicians of “stealing” seems off-base and overly harsh, she says.

“To me, as a musician, someone who understands how songs are made and understands the history of how music compositional practices have developed, it just doesn’t make sense to me that people characterize these cases as ‘Did one artist steal from another?’ Stealing has all these morally coded references to it that don’t actually appear in our copyright laws.”

The law continues to view music as “writing,” something written down on sheet music, Wilson says, noting, “That’s just completely disconnected from how the music brought into modern copyright cases is written.

“In practice, a lot of music isn’t written down at all, and even when it is, the barebones musical scores don’t capture the entire work.

“What the law should protect is what an artist has added on top of these basics,” she says. “They should be protecting the production techniques in the studio or the sound concept the artist brings to their work, because that is where the innovation is happening now.”

Wilson has published law review articles on the gaps between musical and legal understandings of musical property, including “The Case for Common Property in Musical Objects” in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law in 2024, and “Locating Timbre in the Copyright Law’s Modern Musical Work” in the Connecticut Law Review in 2025.

A native of Michigan, Wilson joined the UB law faculty this summer after serving as a clerk on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C. While in school, she performed numerous recitals — mostly on classical guitar, the instrument she studied while earning her bachelor of music performance degree from Oakland University in Michigan. She has remained an active performer, as a singer in symphonic choirs in Ann Arbor during law school at the University of Michigan and now in her new home in Buffalo. She will start teaching property law and intellectual property law to UB law students and students in the school’s undergraduate curriculum this spring.

The lessons learned from studying property law — and in particular the conflicts between musical and legal understandings of artistic property — can illustrate to students how property conventions work in a given community.

“That’s the lesson,” she says. “Communities perceive things they do and don’t own in a certain way based on their customs. They have their own set of ‘norms’ that can conflict with what the law is. How do courts sort it out when one community’s ideas of property differ from another? Sometimes what the law really intended can be distorted. When different communities perceive property differently, you have conflict.”

For a legal researcher, having this deep expertise in a different field than law makes her aware of how careful anyone doing interdisciplinary legal scholarship has to be, Wilson notes.

“I use a lot of my musical expertise in my legal scholarship, and I’m aware of both how much I know and how much I don’t know about music,” she says. “That’s humbling, in a way, because it shows me how much goes into doing good research in any field. I understand how complex things can get in bringing my legal and musical ideas together, and I have to assume other areas are like that, too.

“It gives you a certain humility about how much there is to learn. I try to be a very careful scholar. It makes me aware of the boundaries of my knowledge.”