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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

musictech.net

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

#191

Post by sandov »

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…

> 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.

What if the author was thinking about generating a specific, original melody when he hit "run"? He just wanted that melody and didn't care about the rest, but he was lazy and it was easier to find his melody among the rest of generated melodies instead of modifying the source code.

Can you deny that he created that melody?

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

#192

Post by dredmorbius »

pergadad wrote: post #181
dredmorbius wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I think the aim is not to claim that other pieces violate this collection's copyright, but rather to invalidate the frivolous claims that such melody sequences are copyrighted to begin with. Either the courts decide they are not, in which case the creators will be happy. Or they are copyrightable and therefore this collection, even if it is in the public domain, is a prior art that invalidates any claim that a newly…

Without the capacity to litigate, that ability is sharply reduced.

Free software achieved its attack on proprietary software not by rejecting copyright claims but by turning them on themselves.

It's a bit like the Tesla Valve, a one-way passive check valve with no moving parts:

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

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

#194

Post by apetresc »

Nasrudith wrote: post #139
simonh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could be helpful and provide a means for people to request their accidentally reproduced private data be redacted. See example below[0]. [0] https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155

Ironically that would be a way to disclose your very real data by omission.

That's the joke.

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

#195

Post by hunter2_ »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #112
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.

Exactly. Harmonic progression is probably the most important part of this, as it imparts context on the melody. The same melody over I-V-IV-vi and vi-V-IV-V is not the same thing.

From what I recall, it's exclusively melody and words which can be copyrighted in terms of songwriting. Harmony isn't copyrightable.

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

#197

Post by hannasanarion »

paulddraper wrote: post #154
Intermernet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a copyrightable melody.

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

#198

Post by hunter2_ »

willvarfar wrote: post #58
albertzeyer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them". So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not? They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive. What if some fu…

Very true. I think the focus has to be on the spirit not the technology. Saying to a lawyer/judge/jurist "hey, this script can generate every possible melody!" _feels_ quite different from saying "every single melody is already written down, on this hard-drive I am waving at you! Look!" Tangent: reminds me of the Hutter Prize for compression (hey, they prize pot recently increased to €500K and I submitted it to HN bu…

So in other words you need to have used the compressor to compress what you are copyrighting, and that which you used it on must have been physically stored in its entirety. Is it provable that this all occurred, if there's no requirement to still have the original? It would require that you also supply the compressor to the court, so that somebody can use your self-extracting magic decompressor, recompress the result, and end up back in the same place. But you could make your compressor simply emit your decompressor, ignoring the input!

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

#199

Post by hannasanarion »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #112
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.

Exactly. Harmonic progression is probably the most important part of this, as it imparts context on the melody. The same melody over I-V-IV-vi and vi-V-IV-V is not the same thing.

Courts don't care about harmony. Most US courts follow a guideline that the copyrightable parts of a composition are melody and lyrics. Nobody has ever successfully sued for stolen chord progression.
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