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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

#201

Post by paulddraper »

hannasanarion wrote: post #197
paulddraper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a copyrightable melody.

It's not four, but eleven letters and two spaces was sufficient for Universal to win against Kamar in the "ET phone home" copyright lawsuit

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

#202

Post by hannasanarion »

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…

> Copyright depends on copying

This is a response to the Flame v Katy Perry lawsuit, where a youtube video with 100,000 views was deemed sufficient popularity for the court to assume copying without proof.

The element that Katy Perry was found to have illegally copied is a 4-note descending line with equal spacing between the notes. In both "Joyful Noise" and "Dark Horse" the pattern was probably generated by a producer pressing the "arp" button on a minor chord in a DAW. Neither of them actually plotted out each of the notes with particular purpose. But the Court still said that the 4-note descending pattern is original and creative enough, the fact that it was composed by software notwithstanding, and illegal to reproduce.

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

#203

Post by shadowgovt »

ajuc wrote: post #166
paulddraper wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).

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 mean copyright and patent aren't a perpetual battle against the "natural" arrangement of idea, and absurdities are extremely possible when the law is misinterpreted or mis-structured.

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

#205

Post by parasense »

I'm sure this has already been remarked upon in comments, but.... Not every possible melody!

A significant portion of melodies likely to be generated by people, or put another way these are the more trivial melodies. The range of complexity is vast, so just like cracking passwords might use a dictionary attack, or use English alphabet, or similar limited scopes, so it goes here.....

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

#206

Post by JadeNB »

shadowgovt wrote: post #203
ajuc wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).

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…

> 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.

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

#208

Post by logfromblammo »

paulddraper wrote: post #201
hannasanarion wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a copyrightable melody.

It's not four , but eleven letters and two spaces was sufficient for Universal to win against Kamar in the "ET phone home" copyright lawsuit

I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".

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

#209

Post by Double_a_92 »

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…

I wasn't really implying that something was bad about the article. Just pointing out that without context your comment looked like spam for some random article.

The original article is something about music. Then you say something about colors. And your article starts with some description of some game called Paranoia. Without already knowing the context this looks completely random.

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

#210

Post by moron4hire »

simonh wrote: post #122
emiliobumachar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claiming copyright of everything won't save you from producing all that child pornography and hate speech, not to mention unauthorized copies of state secrets. ;)

For the state secrets, the state would have to identify the specific strings that constitute the violation, so that's unlikely to be a problem in practice.

Nah, they have no problem identifying the string, they'll just slap you with a gag order, which itself will also have a gag order.
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