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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

#241

Post by tripzilch »

syntheticnature wrote: post #230
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).

What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :)

[0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.

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

#242

Post by derefr »

jerf wrote: post #225
logfromblammo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment

Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrighted, unable to be used without license.

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

#243

Post by DeusExMachina »

jniedrauer wrote: post #236
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

For scale, there are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.

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

#244

Post by fwip »

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.

Jefferson's rich friends.

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

#245

Post by Retric »

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…

Representative governments are well known for supporting powerful groups over the collective benefit of society. Just look at any of those countries tax codes and you will find a multitude of special exceptions.

Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it was proposed in the US constitution. However, because a tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference you get the modern mess of unending copyright.

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

#246

Post by jerf »

derefr wrote: post #242
jerf wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrigh…

Yeah, it's more a thought experiment you get in copyright class. You are right, legally the matter is fairly settled.

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

#247

Post by lmkg »

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.

Copyright law considers the importance of a sample to the work as a whole, in addition to just the size. Any arbitrary three-word phrase from the middle of a script is probably not copyright infringement. The most memorable line from the entire movie probably is.

Related: The Supreme Court ruled that excerpting a single paragraph from a 454-page book can be copyright infringement. The book was Gerald Ford's memoirs, the one paragraph was his reasoning for pardoning Nixon. The Court's reasoning was more-or-less that nobody cared about anything else Ford did, so excerpting the one paragraph was as good as giving the whole book away for free.

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

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

jerf wrote: post #225
logfromblammo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> 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.

It's not just the music industry. The whole economy starts to feel like overfitting the profit function.

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

#249

Post by braindongle »

Love the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lonesome Road, and put boundaries around melodies [2].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Larry-Polansky-Worlds-Longest-Melody/...

[1] https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIifUv1Tmk

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