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.…
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.
Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
141–150 of 340 posts
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#142This reads like an Onion article. I heard about this on Lawful Masses with Leonard French, a copyright attorney who pwned Prenda Law. Also, the number of potential melodies, considering the degrees of freedom involved, is on the order of the number of games of chess. IANAL but this doesn't seem more than a stunt to call attention to the legal climate.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#143The code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.) Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org ( https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets )? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to cre…
Yep. They could've used that space for rainbowtables. I'm old enough to remember when someone from shm00 had rainbowtables available for download, but I guess the network bills added up or the feds threatened them.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't pre-generate all the "books", right? So they can't claim the copyright (it's not "affixed to a physical medium")
So what is the difference between a program that views some text by reading it from a huge file and a program that views the same text by generating it on the fly? Especially if the file is generated by the very same process that happens on the fly in the second case? Why would you even have to actually build one of the two programs, enumerating all possible character sequences of some given length is a somewhat obvi…
There is something missing here.
If I were to write a "random book generator" that just regurgitate infinite text then I can copyright a pair starting index and length, but not simply all possible finite sequences of letters.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#145So we could create a directory in IPFS with all melodies possible? :)
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely not? If there are more numbers that can be represented in any amount of bytes (as shown by the diagonal argument), then you cannot represent a constructive proof for each of them in any amount of bytes.
Kind of. A constructive proof by definition means something like you can explain exactly what the number is in a finite number of bytes. The standard diagonalization argument is a constructive proof, identifying a specific number. Normally a constructive proof is preferable. But with a bit of hand waving you can make it into a non-constructive proof that there are "unknowable" numbers that cannot be described in any…
In practice constructible for reals mean that you can approximate them with arbitrarily small know precision e.g. a sequence of retional number numbers q_n each no more that 1/n apart from the actual real number.
The point is that such a sequence needs to be constructive in the usual sense, so there are still only a countable number of them.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
The code actually can produce every possible melody in MIDI. They simply have not stored every possible melody explicitly (uncompressed) on a hard drive (which is impossible, as the size is infinity). However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way). So the question reduces to how much the type of compression ma…
Gotta love programmers. > So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here If you compress, you can copyright the compressed bytes. If you don't compress, you can copyright the uncompressed bytes. As far as that copyright extending to derivations, e.g. decompressions, the answer indeed situation-dependent. For example, converting a copyrighted font from TTF to WOFF does not remove the copyrigh…
> But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright.
I hope nobody takes this as legal advice; I'm not a lawyer but I'm fairly certain it's wrong. The font would still be the same work.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta love programmers. > So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here If you compress, you can copyright the compressed bytes. If you don't compress, you can copyright the uncompressed bytes. As far as that copyright extending to derivations, e.g. decompressions, the answer indeed situation-dependent. For example, converting a copyrighted font from TTF to WOFF does not remove the copyrigh…
Is uncompression a derivation?
I updated my comment to make this more clear. tl;dr depends.
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta love programmers. > So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here If you compress, you can copyright the compressed bytes. If you don't compress, you can copyright the uncompressed bytes. As far as that copyright extending to derivations, e.g. decompressions, the answer indeed situation-dependent. For example, converting a copyrighted font from TTF to WOFF does not remove the copyrigh…
> But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright. I hope nobody takes this as legal advice; I'm not a lawyer but I'm fairly certain it's wrong. The font would still be the same work.
Alright, you made me add references :)
It comes down to this: Typefaces/glyphs are not copyrightable. The font code that produces those glyphs is.
> Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer)...However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a font) is protectable as copyright. [1]
In software, a similar "black-box" derivation process has happened many times, e.g. UNIX/GNU. Copyrights applies to software source code, but not software functionality.
Determining what is the "essential, creative work" in each case in a nuanced way is a matter for courts and armies of lawyers: Apple round corners, Oracle Java APIs, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
Re: Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intent
Again, there is a gradation and you've not answered the question. What is the intent if a human provided 1 bit of input by flipping a coin and chose all the odd numbered melodies? What if a human provided 1 bit of input by flipping an unobservable mental coin? What about 2 bits? N bits? What if a machine generated all the "interesting" melodies via a neural network?
> What is the intent ...
What is the intent? You tell us. Was the person doing it to try and capitalize on someone else's creative works?