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I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

royvanrijn.com

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Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#51

Post by munk-a »

wincy wrote: post #45
jerf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're assuming that they actually have any copyright on this. They don't. It's not identical but see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 for some similar issue. And in general, you must be "creative" to have a copyright. You might have a "copyright" on the resulting file, but no court would ever dream of extending that to a claim of copyright on every melody. There is no way that the author…

I mean, the game No Man’s Sky procedurally generates 18 quintillion planets but they hold a copyright on all of those planets, don’t they? They certainly haven’t explored all of the planets.

IANAL but I'm pretty sure generating something, even something creative, isn't enough for protection if it isn't novel and distinct. I'd assume none of their planets would be protected since there are 18 quintillion of them and most of them have never actually been rendered - but the process to generate planets of that style might be protectable.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#52

Post by [deleted] »

svantana wrote: post #39
almet wrote: post #26

This is a mathematical approach to music, and lacks (from my point of view) what is the mere essence of music : choice. I understand why they want to take back the copyright on music, but they do so in such a geeky way that it seems completely useless to me. Ultimately, musicians will pick good / cool melodies from this dataset, in the same way they do when in front of an instrument. I might be missing the point ?

Of course, any digitally representable artform can be enumerated this way. What's special is that melodies have low enough entropy that it's actually practical to create them all, which isn't the case with (say) movies or novels. And that low entropy is also why spurious similarities occur, as when huge pop stars are accused of plagiarising some band with 200 soundcloud followers.

[deleted]

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#53

Post by kube-system »

eweise wrote: post #2

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

Copyright does take into account the entire work.

However, people will sometimes claim that a portion of their work is stolen.

The idea here is to give someone a citation of it existing elsewhere as a defense to the above. Although this is a very experimental endeavor and some suspect it won’t be taken very seriously in an actual court, because the context in which it was created may undermine some of the creative requirements for qualification under copyright law.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#54

Post by munk-a »

ovi256 wrote: post #7
eweise wrote: post #2

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

This may be a consequence of copyright law being developed in Europe. The European musical tradition is mostly concerned with harmony, and less with rhythm. A musical culture focusing on harmony would be most of the African traditions.

This is especially relevant when it comes to timbre a musical quality that's extremely difficult to even record in staff and bar notation.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#55

Post by jerf »

wincy wrote: post #45
jerf wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're assuming that they actually have any copyright on this. They don't. It's not identical but see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 for some similar issue. And in general, you must be "creative" to have a copyright. You might have a "copyright" on the resulting file, but no court would ever dream of extending that to a claim of copyright on every melody. There is no way that the author…

I mean, the game No Man’s Sky procedurally generates 18 quintillion planets but they hold a copyright on all of those planets, don’t they? They certainly haven’t explored all of the planets.

Imagine you load the No Man's Sky source code, and you break it all down, and you load the assets in. You certainly have a copyright on all the assets.

You don't generally end up with a copyright on all possible combinations. You may still de facto "own" the copyright if all possible combinations encompass parts of your own creation. For instance, I've been playing XCom 2 lately. It has a character creator. Firaxis can't claim to own all the possible combinations of characters it can create, but they own a substantial portion of the parts. I don't think they could claim they own eyes of a particular color or particular shades of skin, but all the clothing, accessories, tattoos, guns, etc. all individually have copyright, so it's still not like I personally can just crank up the character creator and claim a copyright on some particular one and start using it for whatever commercial purposes I desire.

No Man's Sky, from the looks of it, is in the same boat. They don't necessarily get "a copyright" on everything their algorithms can possibly generate, but at the same time, if someone produces an exact match of any of the 18 quintillion planets they must be using plenty of copyrighted assets along the way. So in practice there may not be a big difference.

Where the difference comes in is when the pieces get to be so fine that they are not themselves copyrightable. To put it in a visual context, the original favicon format was 16x16. Even at full 24-bit color, that's only 2^32 possibly favicons. It's trivial to enumerate them. But you can't copyright a single pixel, and you can't simply claim a copyright on all combinations. The former is a bare fact, and the latter had no creativity ("enumerate all possibilities" is not creative, it's a homework assignment in Comp Sci 201). You can't copyright a single note, it's a bare fact. You can't copyright all enumerated combinations of them. You can copyright the program used to generate them, but that doesn't give you rights to the output.

So, they do and they don't. And the sense in which they do doesn't match the sense in which trying to copyright all possible melodies does.

In the event that you have something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fZBUsn5RYg , kkrieger, a super-procedurally-generated game that doesn't have any clear textures or geometry in its code, I think you could claim a copyright on what gets manifested, but not on every conceivable thing the algorithm could generate. What gets manifested will be a much more reasonable amount of protection relative to the effort, merely polynomial at most, rather than exponential. Exponential is, you know, really big.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#56

Post by Kye »

marssaxman wrote: post #48
almet wrote: post #26

This is a mathematical approach to music, and lacks (from my point of view) what is the mere essence of music : choice. I understand why they want to take back the copyright on music, but they do so in such a geeky way that it seems completely useless to me. Ultimately, musicians will pick good / cool melodies from this dataset, in the same way they do when in front of an instrument. I might be missing the point ?

The point is that applying copyright law to music leads to absurd outcomes. It is a bad idea, and ought to be abolished.

What do you imagine would change if musicians couldn't protect their work?

As a musician, I think what would happen is the companies that abuse copyright now would keep abusing musicians, except now they can just take any song they like without compensating the person who made it.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#58

Post by swamp40 »

eweise wrote: post #2

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

What about the silence between notes? Copyrighted or no? Their Jingle Bells sounds horrible with no silent spaces.

Re: I became the world's most prolific DJ, using code

#60

Post by ARandumGuy »

Kye wrote: post #56
marssaxman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that applying copyright law to music leads to absurd outcomes. It is a bad idea, and ought to be abolished.

What do you imagine would change if musicians couldn't protect their work? As a musician, I think what would happen is the companies that abuse copyright now would keep abusing musicians, except now they can just take any song they like without compensating the person who made it.

Broadly speaking, there are 3 main copyrights that apply to a given piece of music: the recording, the overall composition, and the melody. The first two are pretty uncontroversial [1]. You can't distribute my recording without my permission, and you can't make money off of a cover version without compensating me.

The melody copyright is where things get really hazy. It's hard to determine when a melody infringes on another melody. What if the notes are the same, but the timing is different? What if the notes aren't exactly the same, but are pretty similar? What if the main melodic ideas are really common in a given genre or style? How do you determine if there was actual copying, or if two musicians just came up with the same idea independently? What if the melody just isn't an important part of the style of a given work? What if the melody is almost the same, but used in a completely different musical context?

There isn't an objective set of criteria that can determine if a melody infringes on another melody, without being too narrow or too broad. And since there's no good criteria, the only way to litigate this is to have better lawyers then the other guy, which rarely works out well for independent artists.

[1] At least, uncontroversial at a high level. The details get messy really quickly.

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