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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

#211

Post by shadowgovt »

JadeNB wrote: post #206
shadowgovt wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like this absurdity was unknown to the framers of copyright. Thomas Jefferson, writing regarding patents, wrote "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society..." And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. ... but that doesn't me…

> And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. Who "generally agree"s on this? The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.

> The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.

But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does.

There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talking seriously about just burning the whole copyright / patent system to the ground. At least a subset of the countries in the groups listed are generally understood to have representative governments.

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

#212

Post by bdowling »

paulddraper wrote: post #201
hannasanarion wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not four , but eleven letters and two spaces was sufficient for Universal to win against Kamar in the "ET phone home" copyright lawsuit

> “ET phone home”

Usually short phrases aren’t supposed to be protectable under copyright. However, when a defendant blatantly appropriates a well-known literary phrase for a commercial purpose like selling unlicensed merchandise, courts may make an exception.

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

#213

Post by libria »

hannasanarion wrote: post #202
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…

> Copyright depends on copying This is a response to the Flame v Katy Perry lawsuit, where a youtube video with 100,000 views was deemed sufficient popularity for the court to assume copying without proof. The element that Katy Perry was found to have illegally copied is a 4-note descending line with equal spacing between the notes. In both "Joyful Noise" and "Dark Horse" the pattern was probably generated by a produ…

Tangentially relevant is Adam Neely's take on that lawsuit: https://youtu.be/0ytoUuO-qvg.

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

#214

Post by kabdib »

Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks.

One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked:

"What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them."

Seriously.

So I told him the story about the king who wanted to reward the inventor of chess, and upon being asked what he wanted the inventor said "one grain of wheat for the first square, two for the second, four for the third..."

I thought a bit, and added "I think that printout would outweigh the planet."

He went away. I was not a helpful geek that day.

Later I realized that I had only considered black-and-white bitmaps, and that preempting copyright on color bitmaps would have meant a lot more planets.

There's got to be a Douglas Adams style tie-in here somewhere involving aliens with planet-chewer-uppers invading and taking Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and then us for some cockamamie copyright scheme in another galaxy . . .

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

#215

Post by ehnto »

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.

Music lawsuits can be based on about as much information as they're conveying. I think that's their point, too. I don't believe they were trying to be satirical, they wanted to prove a point about the nature of music itself that could be used in defending musicians against lawsuits.

One of the items they were trying to point out, often abused in lawsuits for pop music, is the idea of "Access". If you came up with an idea all by yourself, but a similar song exists that is popular enough, the court argues that just by there being the possibility that you heard it, you therefore definitely heard it and then copied it.

If this music set exists, and is freely available, shouldn't it be considered that you had reasonable access to it and therefore stole it? No, of course not, that would be a ridiculous assumption and so is the current outlook of a song being popular being enough proof that you stole the idea.

Not to mention, music is extremely formulaic. Chord progressions have a natural tendency to certain forms, with centuries of prior art, rhythm within genres of music is often the same, even melodies have a trend toward particular combinations (leading tones over chord progressions bring about lots of similar sounding solos).

Any musician trying to claim copyright for their music should remember that their song only exists on the back of centuries of musical exploration. Consider how much of the song you can say is truly novel, it's going to be nearly nothing.

The combination of lyrics + chords + melody is in my opinion, the absolute minimum you need to claim a song has been copied. Lyrics are derivative, melodies are derivative, chord progressions are derivative, but together they have the chance to be a unique combination.

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

#216

Post by ehnto »

hannasanarion wrote: post #199
IAmGraydon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But a melody over one chord progression, versus the same melody over another chord progression, is surely a different song.

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

#217

Post by JadeNB »

shadowgovt wrote: post #211
JadeNB wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. Who "generally agree"s on this? The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.

> The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society. But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does. There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talki…

> one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people

Yeah, that's the assumption I take issue with.

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

#218

Post by ehnto »

Lewton wrote: post #46
lillesvin wrote: post #18

Adam Neely (professional musician and YouTuber mostly about music theory) did a video about this with the guys behind it: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw

This really needs to be at the top, as it answers a lot of the criticisms found here on HN

It also makes it clear they realise the limitations of the exercise (it isn't nearly all possible melodies), and it shows their motives a bit better too (helping protect against corporate music copyright trolls).

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

#219

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by yborg »

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 also cleverly disguised PR for the attorney. Well played (so to speak).
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