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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

#281

Post by irrational »

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.

I don’t know what any of those words mean (octave, melody, tempo, harmony, diatonic?)

Do you have a book that you would recommend to learn about these terms?

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

#282

Post by effingwewt »

kevinventullo wrote: post #260
tripzilch wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently celebrated my billionth second :)

Haha, nice! Here's to the next billion seconds! This is now my favorite way to tally life~

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

#283

Post by jniedrauer »

messe wrote: post #270
jniedrauer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I give up. I shouldn't post before having coffee.

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

#284

Post by shadowgovt »

JackFr wrote: post #274
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…

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.

Copyright as an institution is grounded on arguments of net societal benefit, and it doesn't take much argument to demonstrate that there is net societal harm to intentionally diminishing people's ability to comply with the law.

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

#285

Post by shadowgovt »

Retric wrote: post #245
shadowgovt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

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

#286

Post by JadeNB »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #222
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.

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 wa…

> I generally agree that society benefits from IP.

I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.

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

#287

Post by JadeNB »

shadowgovt wrote: post #285
Retric wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

> "A tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference" seems like a utilitarian argument that the system is working as intended; there is net positive benefit.

If tiny minority + 'society' is the entirety of the system, then that's true, but there are also plenty of players who lose out due to restrictive IP regimes—and it's hard to quantify the extent of those losses. (Whether or not the benefits they would reap from looser IP are appropriate or fair is beside the question for utilitarian computations.)

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

#288

Post by ninju »

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…

A small tangent over to describing how many different permutations you can have with deck of cards

Taken from https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

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

#289

Post by molmalo »

paulddraper wrote: post #154
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.…

> 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.

Well, somebody should then copyright the whole contents of https://libraryofbabel.info/

:)

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

#290

Post by NikolaeVarius »

olooney wrote: post #252
tripzilch wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Beholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno

I wonder what the system as a whole is rated to. I suspect the motor will give out within another decade. I doubt that the system used a super long life motor, but I could be very wrong.
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