The brief appearance of Liewald's "Eye Closeup" in Apple marketing materials may indicate that its use was a mere oversight. Alternatively, of course, it could be that Apple was merely acting in a "We're Apple. We can do what we want" mode. We'll have to wait for the jury trial that Liewald has requested to find out.

I heard a show, probably on NPR, about use of popular music in TV commercials. Ad agencies don't care about copyright. They edit a commercial to whatever song they fancy. Any song they like is theirs for the taking. They are not going to re-edit their masterpiece to fit different music.

That leaves the customer (or manager) with a problem. Buy a license? But the composer hates your product and there's not enough money in the budget. Run the ad as-is? Somebody might notice. (That's what Apple did here.) Hire another composer to clone the song? A popular solution that can work. Equally likely somebody is going to notice that the beat and tune and structure are the same, and you get sued.

Or, far more likely, we'll never find out - disputes like this one are usually settled with a nice payout rather than a day in court.

I said in a previous thread, if file-stealers kept good records they might be able to play by the big boys' rules and pay royalty rates instead of punitive damages when RIAA comes suing. The lawyers will figure out how many copies Apple made and what the going rate for similar use is.