Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

musictech.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 340 posts

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

#331

Post by paulddraper »

bdowling wrote: post #322
lmkg wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but no one is disputing the legal eligibility of movies or songs for copyright protection.

The question in play is how much of of the copyrighted work may be reproduced before it is infringement.

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

#332

Post by mustacheemperor »

725686 wrote: post #160

This reminds me a lot a short story "The Library of Babel" by argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges in which he conceives "a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel *Edit: book -> short story

There is at least one website that hosts a "real" library of babel (generatively).

https://libraryofbabel.info

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

#333

Post by scotty79 »

steelbird wrote: post #234
scotty79 wrote: post #228

It wouldn't work in my country. Thing has to have individual creative quality to be copyrighted. Autogenerated stuff doesn't get copyright unless a human chose one of the autogenerated things for some particular creative reason. Then this thing gets copyright.

Which country?

Poland.

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

#334

Post by jiofih »

albertzeyer wrote: post #56
willvarfar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the very beginning of this excellent interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw that I found in the comments here, they explain this. Apparently, for this to work, they have to "affix them to a physical medium". Strongly recommend watching that video! Excellent info.

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them". So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not? They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive. What if some fu…

Its just the practicals of copyright law. You don’t copyright the idea of a song, a plan for a song, or code that generates a song. You register the tablature accompanied by a recording. See https://medium.com/@dawn_ellmore_employment/what-does-tangib...

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

#335

Post by jiofih »

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’s about “permanence”, not being able to copyright a live performance that wasn’t recorded for example. It just means you need to be able to distribute / replay the recording, and that means using one of the current common audio technologies.

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

#337

Post by braindongle »

eweise wrote: post #253
braindongle wrote: post #249

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 Lo…

8 notes is what popular music is based on. I don't see why it matter what the tempo is. Pretty sure no one would be in danger of copyright infringement of a 17 month pause.

> 8 notes is what popular music is based on.

OK, forget everything I said but the 8 notes thing. Just, no. "Yesterday"? Great melody. whistle just the first eight notes. "Yesterday, love was such an eas". Hmm. Wonder if there are more examples.

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

#338

Post by nybble41 »

goto11 wrote: post #330
nybble41 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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 m…

> You can enumerate any finite number.

Not within a fixed time period in the real world. You're limited by the matter and energy available, and by the speed of light. However we're not talking about the theoretical ideal limits of computation. The upper bound would be 300k melodies for each second since the program was written—68.7 billion in all, according to the Adam Neely interview linked from the Press page of the project site. Which is a lot, but then there are hundreds of millions of known songs, each of which is likely to contain multiple melodies, some of which are much more likely to be chosen than others. Accidental duplication is thus quite likely.

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

#339

Post by nkrisc »

jnbiche wrote: post #119
nkrisc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all great until the judge asks for a demonstration to show it can generate the material you're presumably suing over.

At that point, you simply explain Cantor's diagonalization proof and the concept of countable and uncountable infinities.

But is it enough to prove that it could produce any melody? After all, couldn't a binary adder produce every executable binary possible? Well, eventually, and with enough memory.

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

#340

Post by tunesmith »

rdlw wrote: post #310
paulgb wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes I am not a musician, but which of these are copied in the Tom Petty / Sam Smith case that motivated this exercise? To my untrained ear, I do hear some similarities in the relative lengths of the notes (meter?). I found a side-by-side comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflFw9T77FQ

I don't have a great ear, but I think it's a similar melody, albeit at a different tempo and key (?). If you can't hear it, try changing the video speed to 1.5x during the Sam Smith part. If these two songs are similar enough, then I think it could be argued that a MIDI sequence has been copied, since in both cases it requires a significant change of tempo and key. A lot of commenters seem to be missing this point: y…

I'm not incredibly familiar with the court cases, nor that of Coldplay/Satriani, but I have a hard time believing that their decisions are algorithmically binding. Like, yes, they might be similar along those particular axes but that doesn't mean those similarities are the sole reason for the court decisions. There's also matters such as - was songwriter #2 exposed to song from songwriter #1? Does the similarity in arrangement imply intent to copy? Etc.
Post reply on HN