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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

#261

Post by db48x »

sullyj3 wrote: post #111
willvarfar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The musican has to cut a CD or something phyiscal. https://www.tunecore.com/guides/copyrights-101 the first paragraph is: > For a work to be “copyrightable,” it must be original and fixed in tangible form, such as a sound recording recorded (affixed to) on a CD or a literary work printed (affixed to) on paper.

is a hard drive not a tangible form? Come to think of it, so is a brain, and everything else capable of storing information. That language is atrocious.

It made a lot more sense when it was originally written.

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

#262

Post by esoterica »

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

Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115.

Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).

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

#263

Post by hansvm »

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

Python is probably trying to compute it exactly.

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

#264

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

I agree, with the small caveat:

> If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song...

Copied. Not stolen. Copied.

Of course I know what you meant, but it's sad that this phrasing has entered the language. In all the tensions around limits of IP protection, this one was probably the most effective trick media companies pulled. Equating copyright violation with theft (and, through implication, their moral weights), even though one has nothing to do with the other.

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

#265

Post by ericfrederich »

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

Not sure where that math came from. 16 bit 8 by 8 pixel image would be 16^(8x8) or in Python...

  print(f"{16 ** (8*8):.4E}")

  1.1579E+77
EDIT: I calculated 16 color, not 16 bit. Disregard

Python wanted to use a float to convert to exponential format but it overflowed. Need to use strings ;-)

  n=(2**16)**(8*8); s=str(n); print(s[0] + '.' + s[1:6] + 'E+' + str(len(s) - 1))

  1.79769E+308

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

#266

Post by db48x »

shadowgovt wrote: post #204

Assuming we accept their premise: how does this prevent lawsuits? Wouldn't the melody-set they've created be subject to a copyright infringement claim from every melody produced before their experiment that is still under copyright?

The method of generation prevents that. They didn't listen to song A and write down the melodies from it, then listen to song B and write down those melodies. They generated them all in order using a computer program.

Presumably it prevents lawsuits because I can write a song starting with a melody from this archive knowing that it's in the public domain. (Or because it makes obvious the absurdity of having a copyright on a 12-note melody in the first place.)

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

#267

Post by jniedrauer »

esoterica wrote: post #262
jniedrauer wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115. Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).

Yeah apparently each pixel of a 16-bit image can have 256 different colors. Oops.

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

#268

Post by TeMPOraL »

malka wrote: post #189
TeMPOraL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the more insightful things on the Internet; well worth the time to read in full. Still, a TL;DR as requested: "Colour" is a term that encompasses provenance, chains of cause-effect, intent and related concepts. Bits are obviously colorless from compsci point of view, but are colorful from the legal POV. For instance, bits encoding a copyrighted video are just numbers, but for the judge it'll matter whethe…

The problem is the inconstitancy. Why in some cases colour matter and in some case, it does not ? no judge will care about the "colour" of child porn. Yet, they will care about the "colour" of a song.

Colour always matters.

(To clarify: Colour does not encode copyright information; it encodes provenance, intent and related ideas. Child porn is only a somewhat special case in the sense that laws are very insensitive about the shade of colour here. Usually, if it looks enough like CP, a possessor will end up in trouble, regardless of whether it's actual CP or whether they can prove they created it ex nihilo in MS Paint. But that's because child abuse is considered by societies worldwide a special kind of evil that needs extraordinary measures to combat. In almost all other cases, courts are very sensitive to the shades of colour.)

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

#269

Post by SilasX »

hannasanarion wrote: post #197
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.

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.

Exactly! What they're doing would otherwise seem pointless, but given how far off the rails the courts went on that lawsuit, copyright jurisprudence needs this kind of sanity check, because courts clearly aren't using enough criteria to call a melody "copied".

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

#270

Post by messe »

jniedrauer wrote: post #267
esoterica wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115. Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).

Yeah apparently each pixel of a 16-bit image can have 256 different colors. Oops.

That's an 8-bit image. Each pixel of a 16-bit image could have 2^16 = 65536 possible colours.
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