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Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

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

#181

Post by pergadad »

dredmorbius wrote: post #157
Robin_Message wrote: post #40

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this: - a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative. - Copyright depends on copying . If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song…

Those are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response). Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes,…

I think the aim is not to claim that other pieces violate this collection's copyright, but rather to invalidate the frivolous claims that such melody sequences are copyrighted to begin with.

Either the courts decide they are not, in which case the creators will be happy.

Or they are copyrightable and therefore this collection, even if it is in the public domain, is a prior art that invalidates any claim that a newly used melody is really new/copyrightable.

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

#182

Post by sandov »

goto11 wrote: post #98
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.…

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 argument simply exposes the ridiculousness of the law.

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

#183

Post by bougiefever »

Intermernet wrote: post #74
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.

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.…

For example, there are a number of songs that include a rendition of Tom's Diner within a larger melody. Also popular to add to a song is the Arabian riff melody (which is so old it's not copyrightable, but you get my point) I don't know of any law suits around Tom's Diner song, but this is an example of the types of ridiculous lawsuits out there over copyright.

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

#184

Post by jdbernard »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #112
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.

Exactly. Harmonic progression is probably the most important part of this, as it imparts context on the melody. The same melody over I-V-IV-vi and vi-V-IV-V is not the same thing.

It is from the courts' point of view.

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

#185

Post by sandov »

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.

It would be interesting to study what % of programmers agree with IP laws vs people in other fields.

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

#186

Post by sandov »

virgilp wrote: post #117
nck4222 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, the library of Babel owns the copyright on every piece of literature that could be written, which would be a terrible idea. https://libraryofbabel.info/

They don't pre-generate all the "books", right? So they can't claim the copyright (it's not "affixed to a physical medium")

By that logic, you wouldn't be able to claim copyright on works that are distributed compressed or encrypted.

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

#188

Post by filoeleven »

Reminds me of an aside in Accelerando:

> His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream – coincidentally uncompressing it – and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo – but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ...

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

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

#189

Post by malka »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #20
Double_a_92 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tl;dr would be nice it you post such a long article that doesn't directly seem to have anything to do with the current topic.

It's one of the more insightful things on the Internet; well worth the time to read in full. Still, a TL;DR as requested: "Colour" is a term that encompasses provenance, chains of cause-effect, intent and related concepts. Bits are obviously colorless from compsci point of view, but are colorful from the legal POV. For instance, bits encoding a copyrighted video are just numbers, but for the judge it'll matter whethe…

The problem is the inconstitancy.

Why in some cases colour matter and in some case, it does not ? no judge will care about the "colour" of child porn. Yet, they will care about the "colour" of a song.

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

#190

Post by razorunreal »

reacweb wrote: post #60
willvarfar wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. I think the focus has to be on the spirit not the technology. Saying to a lawyer/judge/jurist "hey, this script can generate every possible melody!" _feels_ quite different from saying "every single melody is already written down, on this hard-drive I am waving at you! Look!" Tangent: reminds me of the Hutter Prize for compression (hey, they prize pot recently increased to €500K and I submitted it to HN bu…

Takes any algorithm that can generates the digits of pi. It is proven that all the sequences of digits are present somewhere in these digits. Can you claim copyright on all the books of the universe because you can show the algorithm that can generate every possible books ?

Without being any kind of copyright expert, this argument doesn't make much sense. If you have the relevant indices into pi, I guess you could claim copyright. The index will be much larger than the original book though. Essentially you have a really bad compression algorithm. I'm not going to get very far claiming that because my decompression algorithm could output any sequence, all sequences are mine.
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