Even a recording by the original artist couldn't stop him from pulling off the heist.

Wikimedia Commons/Anthony22

Not all copyright theft involves dingy dorm rooms or street stalls. Here's a parable about when jazz, celebrity, and recording technology colluded to steal a song and etch the theft in stone.

In 1946, the jazz guitarist Chuck Wayne led a little jam session in Oklahoma City. The trumpeter Sonny Berman played in the session, too; maybe in honor of him, the band played a song Wayne had written on top of the harmony to "How High the Moon," called "Sonny."

The song then disappears from the fossil record. But eight years later, Miles Davis records a nearly identical song on his 1954 album Walkin', in a studio in Hackensack, NJ. That song, called Solar, shares the exact same melody and all but one chord change with Sonny. And it's that song which gets copyrighted in 1963 (seventeen years after the jam session) and that song which gets engraved on Davis' tombstone (photographed above).

This story comes from Larry Appelbaum, a senior music archivist for the Library of Congress, who supplies the recordings, photos and context over at his blog. According to the pianist Ethan Iverson, some musicians had known for years that Solar wasn't Davis's, but recorded confirmation only emerged when Diane Wayne, Chuck Wayne's widow, donated his collection to the Library of Congress last year.