Won't they have inadvertently copyrighted tunes already under copyright? That is to say for anything written before this stunt, they've given away rights they don't own.
Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
271–280 of 340 posts
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#272Earlier 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.
Yes, that is very similar to the copyright argument made by Flame.
Of course not every set of four notes or eleven letters in a copyrighted work is prohibited; the significance and context of the use matters.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#273Assuming 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 copyrig…
It doesn’t prevent lawsuits, or do anything at all. Other comments here are close; this material is not an original work, so copyright does not subsist in it. No copyright, no ability to place in public domain or issue licenses at all. This is the equivalent of pouring a glass of water in the ocean and then declaring you own all international waters.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).
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…
It's weird -- legal arguments aren't protected under any sort of intellectual property regime. In fact in common law jurisdictions, it's encouraged for you base your work off that of previous practitioners. I always wonder how different our intellectual property regime would be if lawyers demanded to be paid royalties for others citing cases which they had won.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#275What an awesome effort. However, frivolous suits will still remain especially in places where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. A lot of these suits are filled knowing that they can't win but use the machinery to drain the defendant's resources until they are forced to submit because they have no means to fight it.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#276I wonder if someone has done this for other things like say, generating all possible combinations for 9*9 Sudoku etc
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#277What an awesome effort. However, frivolous suits will still remain especially in places where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. A lot of these suits are filled knowing that they can't win but use the machinery to drain the defendant's resources until they are forced to submit because they have no means to fight it.
If they have no means to fight it, where would the money come to pay it?
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I internally editorialized your first statement to be "all the possible [finite] byte sequences contain all the possible programs". Because you cannot enumerate all infinite byte sequences, according to Cantor's diagonal argument as linked earlier. [1] Calling certain numerical representations "computer programs" in no way changes the fundamentals. There is no way -- no matter how clever your encoding -- to enumerate…
I am not the person you were originally responding to. You don't have to enumerate all real numbers to create a mapping from real numbers to infinite byte sequences. I am merely pointing out that the first statement only becomes false if you editorialize it to "all the possible [finite] byte sequences contain all the [infinite] possible programs". If you treat the meaning of "possible" consistently in that sentence,…
Yes, you're right. I did not do a clear job of explaining the flaw.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#279Back 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…
Most of the generated images would just be noise though. You could probably be more clever than just generating random images, and have a decent chance of generating something that someone would design. These days you could use neural networks, but obviously that wasn’t feasible then
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#280Earlier 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.
Some people would tell you it's an ill-posed question.
Some might say lumping trademark, copyright, patent and trade secret laws (historically and in practice very different things) under one heading called "intellectual property" is an intentional strategy to muddy the waters and cloud any argument.