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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

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Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#151

Post by danbruc »

afiori wrote: post #144
danbruc wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the difference between a program that views some text by reading it from a huge file and a program that views the same text by generating it on the fly? Especially if the file is generated by the very same process that happens on the fly in the second case? Why would you even have to actually build one of the two programs, enumerating all possible character sequences of some given length is a somewhat obvi…

There is something missing here. If I were to write a "random book generator" that just regurgitate infinite text then I can copyright a pair starting index and length, but not simply all possible finite sequences of letters.

I would argue writing a book, composing a song, or inventing a device should be viewed as a search process. You are wandering around in the space of all possible books, songs, or devices looking for one that is interesting to read, pleasant to listen to, or useful to use. Your work is mainly identifying special items in the vast space of possible items, making it physical once identified is only secondary, at least for the purpose of this discussion. So writing a computer program to generate all possible songs is finding a specific and - at least somewhat - useful program among all possible programs and - ignoring its triviality and the general questions about copyright - seems copyrightable to me. On the other hand using this program to turn the space of all possible songs from something in your head into a huge pile of MIDI files on a disk seems not copyrightable to me because you do not single out interesting songs. Finding a good song did not get significantly easier, searching through and listening to a sea of MIDI files instead of playing all possible combinations of notes on a piano and judging the sound of it.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#152

Post by jameshart »

mannykannot wrote: post #136
goto11 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

Ha! It does not work however, as a person's sexual preference is a fact, and a statement that either guesses or spits out all recognized variants is not a source of factual information -- no-one is any the wiser afterwards than before.

On the other hand if you offered it up as a fact with reckless disregard for its truthfulness...

Again we see programmers trying to understand the law in terms of ‘how can a piece of data be illegal?’ while the law is quite happily focusing on making specific actions illegal.

‘You can’t arrest me, gold bars aren’t illegal!’ ‘Yes, but carrying them out of the federal reserve vault without permission is.’

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#153

Post by jameshart »

paulddraper wrote: post #149
paulgb wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright. I hope nobody takes this as legal advice; I'm not a lawyer but I'm fairly certain it's wrong. The font would still be the same work.

Alright, you made me add references :) It comes down to this: Typefaces/glyphs are not copyrightable. The font code that produces those glyphs is. > Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer)...However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a fon…

Presumably copyright law makes this allowance for type because the point of typefaces is to be reproduced.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#154

Post by paulddraper »

Intermernet wrote: post #74
tunesmith wrote: post #42

It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years.…

> copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale

Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet!

The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#155

Post by paulgb »

paulddraper wrote: post #149
paulgb wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright. I hope nobody takes this as legal advice; I'm not a lawyer but I'm fairly certain it's wrong. The font would still be the same work.

Alright, you made me add references :) It comes down to this: Typefaces/glyphs are not copyrightable. The font code that produces those glyphs is. > Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer)...However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a fon…

Thanks for supporting your point :) I have to admit that the difference in copyrightability of fonts vs. typefaces is new to me.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#156

Post by paulddraper »

jameshart wrote: post #153
paulddraper wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, you made me add references :) It comes down to this: Typefaces/glyphs are not copyrightable. The font code that produces those glyphs is. > Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer)...However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a fon…

Presumably copyright law makes this allowance for type because the point of typefaces is to be reproduced.

That is in fact, the point of all digitized information, including recorded audio.

(But yes, I do agree that typefaces are exceptionally commonly distributed.)

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#157

Post by dredmorbius »

Robin_Message wrote: post #40

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this: - a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative. - Copyright depends on copying . If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song…

Those are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response).

Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes, the rights of the author to sue for any claims including moral claims of authorship.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340325

So: clever stunt, but legally impotent, both by law and the self-neutering actions of the actors here.

Adam Neely's video (interviewing Rhiel and collaborator Noah Rubin) covers many points of copyright, though not the originality, authorship, or PD angles. (Posted elsewhere in thread, echoing here.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#158

Post by shkkmo »

phonebucket wrote: post #75
vbezhenar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything including god. So you can claim copyright for everything.

> You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything... Not to get too far off topic, but even an infinitely long byte sequence cannot represent all numbers. It's possible to construct something not representable by that sequence via Cantor's diagonal argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diag…

Perhaps I am mis-undertanding the diagonal argument, but it doesn't appear to show what you claim it shows.

The diagonal argument seems to be a proof that there are uncountably many infinite byte sequences. So while it proves that it would impossible to "enumerate" every infinite byte sequence, it doesn't prove that there exists a number that cannot be represented by some infinite byte sequence.

Indeed, I believe the opposite can be shown to be true by constructing a mapping from every finite number to an infinite byte sequence. ASCII trivially provides such a mapping for real numbers, and finite-tuples of real numbers (such as imaginary numbers) can be mapped by alternating digits from each element of the tuple.

Edit: The key distinction is that the set of finite byte sequences is infinite, but countable, while the set of infinite byte sequences is not only infinite, but also uncountable. Which of these two sets is deemed the set of "possible byte sequences" seems to be the critical distinction and the turn of phrase "all possible byte sequences in the universe" seems to imply all byte sequences of finite length.

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#159

Post by auiya »

albertzeyer wrote: post #83
tunesmith wrote: post #42

It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.

The code actually can produce every possible melody in MIDI. They simply have not stored every possible melody explicitly (uncompressed) on a hard drive (which is impossible, as the size is infinity). However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way). So the question reduces to how much the type of compression ma…

Every possible combination of 8 notes in 12 beats is not infinite. Assuming all quarter notes it's just (8^12)-(8-1)^12 = 54,878,189,535. If you factor in rhythmic variances, the number is much much larger, but still not infinite.

https://plus.maths.org/content/how-many-melodies-are-there

Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

#160

Post by 725686 »

This reminds me a lot a short story "The Library of Babel" by argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges in which he conceives "a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

*Edit: book -> short story

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