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The whole story reminded me of this axis of awesome (OZ comedy group) song (well worth watching): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I&list=RD5pidokakU...
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
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There are eighty-eight notes. One hundred and seventy-six, if your ear is good enough to pick out quarter tones. Add in rests and so forth, different time signatures. Pick a figure for maximum number of notes a melody can contain. I do not know the figure for the maximum possible number of melodies--too many variables--but I am sure it is quite high.
"I am certain that is not infinity.
"For one thing, a great many of those possible arrays of eighty-eight notes will not be perceived as music, as melody, by the human ear. Perhaps more than half. They will not be hummable, whistleable, listenable--some will be actively unpleasant to hear. Another large fraction will be so similar to each other as to be effectively identical: if you change three notes of the Moonlight Sonata, you have not created something new.
I do not know the figure for the maximum number of discretely appreciable melodies, and again I'm certain it is quite high, and again I am certain that it is not infinity
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Do read it It's scary and prescient.
Ex. Once a work of song makes $10M it should just go into the public domain. Want to make more? Keep writing more songs.
This only works for western music
It should work for declaring melodies in any system of music that has notation. Now, you're correct if you're saying that not all music has melodies. Or that things like Indian ragas would be difficult to run through exhaustive permutation. But, as far as I know all music in the world has native notation or can be notated and reproduced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fun concept, and maybe will be useful in some weird edge case of a lawsuit, but no. Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of the sound design, groove, rhythms, chord progressions, melody or reduced melody, structure, and lyrics wind up giving a song the same "feel" as a prior song, and that's the basis of the copyright infringement. Then pseudoscientific experts come in an…
>Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1] He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out there, his is very weak. >Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of... There is a very good reason: as he mentions, the chords diversity use in pop songwriting is typically so poor that based only on that, the amount of…
I think Adam Neely did a good job explaining what infringement lawsuits mean in the context of popular music production. Whether or not you agree with the strength of his case on this particular lawsuit, well that's not quite the point I was trying to make here. Still, what do you consider to be a strong take on this case?
Something that doesn't seem to have been discussed from the legal angle is this: if one can make any copyright claim about these datasets qualifying as "prior art", doesn't that then open itself up for trolls to claim that the datasets infringe on existing prior art? It's not like I can draw a pikachu, release it to public domain and make a slam dunk legal claim that all other pikachus are henceforth kosher. I think…
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.
Something that doesn't seem to have been discussed from the legal angle is this: if one can make any copyright claim about these datasets qualifying as "prior art", doesn't that then open itself up for trolls to claim that the datasets infringe on existing prior art? It's not like I can draw a pikachu, release it to public domain and make a slam dunk legal claim that all other pikachus are henceforth kosher. I think…
Is there still a value in this as a Reductio ad absurdum? A short cut that makes it less neccessary to slog through a prior art battle in each and every case?
There's a bazillion examples of flat out copying being considered perfectly fine: the lyrics for Anne Marie's "2002" clearly uses iconic lyrics from Britney Spears pretty much verbatim, and in a way that is obviously intended to refer to Britney, but the thing is that many many other artists before her have done similar homages (e.g. Calvin Harris' "My Way" references Sinatra's, etc) so there's a fairly strong reason to believe that a lawsuit based solely on similarity grounds would go nowhere.