Spotify is seeking a patent for a new plagiarism detection tool designed to weed out impostor songs and help songwriters avoid litigation, Music Business Worldwide reports. The proposed Plagiarism Risk Detector And Interface technology would allow a song’s lead sheet, a form of musical notation including melody, chords, and lyrics, to be fed into AI software “trained on a plurality of preexisting encoded lead sheets” to calculate a “similarity value” to other compositions in its database.

Credited in part to AI expert François Pachet, the tech’s GUI “provides dynamic visual feedback in substantially real-time,” allowing artists and composers to detect plagiarism and tweak elements of their work during the composition process. “Such a tool,” the patent filing explains, “would allow artists to generate lead sheets more quickly and confidently by detecting and providing visual feedback as to whether any aspect of the work has a probability of being deemed plagiaristic.”

Spotify claims that their tool is significantly more intuitive and precise than existing techniques like the Music Plagiarism Detection System based on melodic similarity and Audio Forensics Meets Music Information Retrieval – A Toolbox For Inspection Of Music Plagiarism, which uses sampling, melody, and rhythm. Just be glad that classic soundalike songs like the Strokes’ “Last Nite” and the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” aren’t being written and released today!