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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

#221

Post by LMYahooTFY »

goto11 wrote: post #98
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.…

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.

This is a complete non sequitur.

Your example is barely plausible, much less demonstrable.

The connection between "original works" using an extremely limited set of notes, and your right to privacy using some theoretical predictive algorithm is not at all obvious.

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

#222

Post by s1artibartfast »

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.

I generally agree that society benefits from IP.

I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability.

On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted.

Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or want financial compensation.

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

#223

Post by bdowling »

cyphar wrote: post #67
tomlong wrote: post #64

I know it's many orders of magnitude more difficult.. but if I got a printer to print out one of every possible art and published it, CC licensed it, etc wouldn't that have the same legal status as these melodies... probably none? I showed this article to a musicologist (in the UK) and he said: > I assume that somehow lawyers can refer to a precedent of "this is too ridiculous to be taken seriously"

The other thing is that machine-generated works almost by definition do not reach the "creative" aspect of the "original and creative" requirement for copyright to apply.

Exactly. Their work is not protectable under copyright because it is not a work of authorship, but an exhaustive list of all possible melodies.

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

#224

Post by hannasanarion »

ehnto wrote: post #216
hannasanarion wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not according to the US court system. American case law defines chord progressions as insufficiently creative for copyright purposes. Usually rhythms are too. The only copyrightable parts of a composition in precedential cases of most US courts are the melody and lyrics.

And apparently arpeggios, because the US District Court of California ruled in Flame vs Katy Perry that arpeggios are "melodic enough" for copyright protection.

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

#225

Post by jerf »

logfromblammo wrote: post #208
paulddraper wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".

Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment, but it doesn't break the system as a whole.

In the latter case, there's also no real risk of accidentally stomping on that.

The claim in this particular case is that they really have generated the entire possible melody space. Legally I think it's likely to fail on multiple levels if it is ever challenged, but part of the point is that some of those failures should also be applied to some real copyright suits that have been won.

(It is somewhat ironic that the music industry continues to be so upset about copyright even as they appear to be converging on The One True Pop Song at speed. Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less.)

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

#226

Post by SilasX »

ehnto wrote: post #215
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…

>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.

Sufficiently advanced “proving a point via absurdity to make a more general argument” is indistinguishable from satire.

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

#228

Post by scotty79 »

It wouldn't work in my country. Thing has to have individual creative quality to be copyrighted. Autogenerated stuff doesn't get copyright unless a human chose one of the autogenerated things for some particular creative reason. Then this thing gets copyright.

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

#229

Post by robrtsql »

ehnto wrote: post #216
hannasanarion wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It matters a lot to the sound of the song, but does it matter to the court?

If I take the entire melody of a Beatles song, including the verse and chorus, but set it to an entirely different chord progression, would the court recognize that as an original song? What if I lifted all of the lyrics as well?

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

#230

Post by syntheticnature »

kabdib wrote: post #214

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 t…

Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).
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