at this rate its just a matter of time until lawsuits will arise because of sentence fragments.
(My song includes the phrase "In a pair of jeans", so you can't use that phrase, I own it.)

At first look, I'd say that's the functional equivalent of what happened in the case cited above... but there are more words than notes, so the number of possible note combinations is more limited than the number of possible word combinations... which makes it even more ridiculous to claim ownership of a series of notes.