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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

#231

Post by pingyong »

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…

By that logic, a program that simply counts up from 0 (with bignums, as long as the machine has enough memory), is actually a compressed form of every single piece of data or information that has ever, will ever or can ever be created.

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

#232

Post by jerf »

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 actually reveals an important truth about the nature of information: Information is often better understood as exclusionary, rather than somehow "creative". If I have a "thing", you don't know what color it is. If I know tell you it is "red", you still don't know the exact shade, but I have excluded a lot of possibilities. How informative my statement is depends on how much is excluded. If I name an exact Pantone color, I am being much more informative.

In some sense, looking at information as being exclusionary and as being inclusive are the same thing, but there's a lot of ways in which the former actually makes more sense as a thought framework.

And in this particular context we can see how that plays out... a list of all possible melodies of a given nature actually has very little information in it, because it doesn't exclude enough. It may superficially seem to our human senses that a lot of stuff has been included/constructed, but in reality, the 'list of every possible melody' is a vapor. There's not actually anything there. It is the act of exclusion of possibilities that leads to interesting information. Such information as this list has is contained in its specification of what a "melody" is. Counterintuitively (to a lot of people's understanding), if they widened the specifications, while they would end up with a bigger list they'd end up with less information in the result.

The act of creating a song isn't a matter of creating the possibilities from the raw nothingness, it's a matter of carving them out of the exponentially-large space of possibilities and finding something there useful. The exponentially-large space is so large that it is very easy to not see it that way, because, I mean, it's huge. It doesn't feel like "removing" possibilities the way carving a 3D stone does ("I remove everything that doesn't look like my desired statue"), because the exponential space is so inexpressibly larger, and we need fundamentally different tools to address such a space, but in the end, it's the same thing.

While this isn't what the law was written for necessarily, the "creativity" requirement here could be very easily pressed into service here. They've expressed very little creativity/exclusion on this list and it would be easy to argue it falls far below the threshold necessary for copyright. As a literary criticism of the system, it is successful and thought provoking... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely.

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

#233

Post by ehnto »

hannasanarion wrote: post #224
ehnto wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Melodies are insufficient on their own in my opinion, the court rules differently I guess. Melodies are just as likely to be formulaic, and are built using similar foundational knowledge as a chord progression (only a subset of notes works in a given progression for example, and conventions lead you toward certain notes of that subset).

A combination of chords, melody, rhythm are I think the only reasonable measure that a song has been copied.

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

#234

Post by steelbird »

scotty79 wrote: post #228

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.

Which country?

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

#235

Post by goto11 »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #221
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.

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.

I agree. I wanted to point out the absurdity of the argument used in the article. The argument is that music is just numbers and numbers are not copyrightable. But any kind of information is "just numbers" which can be enumerated given enough time.

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

#236

Post by jniedrauer »

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…

I tried calculating this number for 16-bit images in Python (8^8^16), and the interpreter just froze. Go was pretty quick though: 3.940200619639448e+115

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

#237

Post by hsitz »

sandov wrote: post #185
paulddraper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It would be interesting to study what % of programmers agree with IP laws vs people in other fields.

And interesting to include in a study like that how much people in each field actually understood about copyright law. My guess is the general level of understanding is pretty low.

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

#238

Post by ehnto »

robrtsql wrote: post #229
ehnto wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Lyrics and melody? I think that's reasonable to consider that an infringement. Melody over a new chord progression? I do think that should be considered a new work, just to limit the scope of copyright. Even if it's clear you copied the melody, I think melody alone is insufficient to call a song. Unless the original song was entirely melody. A melody is using all the same musical building blocks as the chord progressions did, why does it get special treatment?

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

#239

Post by notahacker »

bdowling wrote: post #212
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

> “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.

Yep. One of the arguments no sane person should countenance is that Katy Perry's songwriters happened to use a four note descending synth arpeggio in an intentional attempt to cash in on the fact a four note descending arpeggio in a different key was a motif used on one of the sixteen tracks of an album which hit number five in the Gospel Charts four years earlier. For similar reasons, Universal isn't going after most of the 3.8m websites using the phrase 'phone home', and you're probably OK using three stripes in artwork unless you're drawing them on the shoulders of sportswear or sides of shoes to make it look like Adidas.

[there actually are musicians that specialise in recording backing tracks intended to resemble a particular popular recording which aren't that recording for use in commercial products, but they tend not to get sued...]

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

#240

Post by derefr »

bdowling wrote: post #212
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

> “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.

Wouldn’t that be considered something more like an implicitly-created trademark? It’s essentially the equivalent of a company motto for the the movie’s SPV company.
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