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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

#321

Post by yellowapple »

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…

You could've settled for every 4×4 bitmap, of which there are only 65,536 black and white ones. Then you could claim any 8×8 bitmap as a derivative work (by concatenation/aggregation/whatever) of up to four of your 4×4 bitmaps.

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

#322

Post by bdowling »

lmkg wrote: post #247
bdowling wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “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 amount and substantiality of the copied portion to the work as a whole is one of the factors for fair use, an affirmative defense.

Whether a work in question is even eligible for protection at all is a distinct legal question.

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

#323

Post by kabdib »

mooman219 wrote: post #316
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…

An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000. Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots. Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1…

(chuckles)

Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-)

We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in Vol 4 . . .

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

#324

Post by mooman219 »

kabdib wrote: post #323
mooman219 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000. Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots. Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1…

(chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in…

A black ink HP 64XL cartridge can print 600 pages assuming a 5% page coverage of ink per page. We're actually coverage roughly 50% per page, and we do that on both sides, so we can only effectively print 30 pages with our HP 64XL cartridge.

The cartridge costs about $40. We can expect to spend around $407,060,000,000,000,000 on printer ink for this endeavor, but HP might consider a bulk rate at that point.

The global world product is roughly $77,868,000,000,000. If we all unite under this noble cause (and assume no economies of scale), we can payoff the cost of the ink in only 5227 and a half years, assuming paper is free (which it totally is, it grows on tress!). If someone works out how much carbon this captures, we might prevent further global warming to troll domestic courts.

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

#325

Post by fargle »

All very interesting discussions. Some have broached on it, but let's be clear: mechanically generated sequences are not copyrightable. The program that generates them is, of course.

It doesn't matter if there isn't enough space to enumerate them all. It doesn't matter if most of them sound like crap. It doesn't matter if some match a pre-existing song. It doesn't matter if you do or do not highlight "interesting" songs.

The very fact that they are machine generated eliminates the element of creativity that is a central requirement to copyright.

Copyright law may be stupid, but it isn't this stupid. An even more stupid argument that isn't even valid doesn't really help.

> 503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.

> In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable.

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

#326

Post by akhosravian »

Nasrudith wrote: post #138
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.

The garbage data makes all of the difference. Said accidental generation would make it legal as the only way to pick out the data is to know it already. Otherwise what separates your real name from "Name: Seymoure Butts Sexual Orientation: Mayonnaise". The fact there is no garbage data at all shows that they are doing judgement on a nakedly wrong level in music - even by the standards of copyright. Selling "Harry Pot…

How about selling grape juice with a warning on how to not ferment it to avoid prohibition laws?

https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...

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

#327

Post by Zacru »

kabdib wrote: post #323
mooman219 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000. Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots. Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1…

(chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in…

Sounds like a 2-d superpermutation. That is going to get messy very quickly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation

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

#328

Post by kabdib »

Zacru wrote: post #327
kabdib wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(chuckles) Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-) We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in…

Sounds like a 2-d superpermutation. That is going to get messy very quickly. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation

Wheee! Thanks for that.

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

#329

Post by goto11 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #138
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.

The garbage data makes all of the difference. Said accidental generation would make it legal as the only way to pick out the data is to know it already. Otherwise what separates your real name from "Name: Seymoure Butts Sexual Orientation: Mayonnaise". The fact there is no garbage data at all shows that they are doing judgement on a nakedly wrong level in music - even by the standards of copyright. Selling "Harry Pot…

I would presume to vast majority of the automatically generate music is basically garbage?

If we say that music (and really any information) is just numbers which can be enumerated automatically, then surely the creative action is finding and picking a number which is actual interesting out of the infinite sea of random garbage.

My point is that framing music as "just numbers" does not disprove that producing a song is a unique creative work. There may be valid arguments against copyright, but this one isn't.

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

#330

Post by goto11 »

nybble41 wrote: post #305
jerf wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Panto…

> ... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely. The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all—so the mere fact that two songs use the same melody is not sufficient to show that one is a copy of the other. The set of melodies that are compatible with human ascetics is even smaller. They don't actual…

> The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all

How does that follow? You can enumerate any finite number. And the article doesn't say how big. Is it a thousand or a trillion? "Riehl says the algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.". The article doesn't say how many seconds it took to generate all melodies though.

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