Musicians Algorithmically Generate Every Possible Melody, Release Them To Public Domain (vice.com) 199
Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued. From a report: Programmer, musician, and copyright attorney Damien Riehl, along with fellow musician/programmer Noah Rubin, sought to stop copyright lawsuits that they believe stifle the creative freedom of artists. Often in copyright cases for song melodies, if the artist being sued for infringement could have possibly had access to the music they're accused of copying -- even if it was something they listened to once -- they can be accused of "subconsciously" infringing on the original content. One of the most notorious examples of this is Tom Petty's claim that Sam Smith's "Stay With Me" sounded too close to Petty's "I Won't Back Down." Smith eventually had to give Petty co-writing credits on his own chart-topping song, which entitled Petty to royalties.
Defending a case like that in court can cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and the outcome is never assured. Riehl and Rubin hope that by releasing the melodies publicly, they'll prevent a lot of these cases from standing a chance in court. In a recent talk about the project, Riehl explained that to get their melody database, they algorithmically determined every melody contained within a single octave. To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.
Defending a case like that in court can cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and the outcome is never assured. Riehl and Rubin hope that by releasing the melodies publicly, they'll prevent a lot of these cases from standing a chance in court. In a recent talk about the project, Riehl explained that to get their melody database, they algorithmically determined every melody contained within a single octave. To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it's considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.
Copyright works two ways (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good point, but they can also just as easily take down one track if it does generate a conflict, which avoids any lawsuits, etc..
Kinda funny to think that 'every melody' has now been written.
Re:Copyright works two ways (Score:5, Informative)
"every melody" that's eight notes over twelve beats and contained within a single octave.
That's like saying I've got a database with every possible password... that's 8 lowercase English characters.
Re:Copyright works two ways (Score:5, Interesting)
for the purpose of not allowing them to unreasonably wield the copyright hammer, I hope this works
the truly creative will not be affected
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""every melody" that's eight notes over twelve beats and contained within a single octave."
Most pop songs have 4 notes and 2 beats max.
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Yup, should cover most pop songs. Although most pop songs are already covered by other pop songs, so not sure how much it adds.
Copyright only protects distribution (Score:2)
As what these guys have done covers every possible melody (I'm guessing up to a certain number of notes), there's
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The (ir)rationale behind this is that every download of a music piece creates a loss for the right holders (a in my opinion fallacious) extension of the concept of opportunity costs, which assumes that profit you could have made but didn't equals a loss, which can seen as damages if caused by a 3rd party and therefore grounds for a lawsuit
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Sorry, but do you have a citation for this? As far as I know, all music 'download' copyright suits center around file sharing networks, where you are participating in sending the data to other users while downloading.
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The best documentation for non sharing cases I can find right now is from the EU, where an EU court ruling in 2017 [europa.eu] also deemed watching a stream (which is seen as some kind of temporary download) of copyrighted material, where the exchange of data is purely unidirectional, without having legally obtained the lice
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Wrong.
It does creates a loss, abeit not the one that most people think.
I make no apologies for how copyright is abused today by many rights holders or the absurdly lo
Re:Copyright works two ways (Score:5, Informative)
No. Independent creation is an absolute defense to copyright infringement. If you can prove you created the work independently, you're completely off the hook.
See e.g. https://www.vondranlegal.com/w... [vondranlegal.com]
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Your link doesn't appear to describe any steps to take to make an independent creation defense more likely to succeed. Do such steps exist?
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"Independent creation" requires authorship and an actual author. While these guys may have authored the program that wrote all of those bits to a hard drive, nobody is the author of the bits written. See the monkey photograph or whatever the hell the newest failed plan is to get animal/AI/
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But by that standard no musical work is creative since it is just using a subset of all possible sequences. Just because you happen to put the sequences in a new order doesn't really make it all that creative. It would be like rearranging the digits 0-9 into a new number. 8-)
Re:Copyright works two ways (Score:4, Informative)
But by that standard no musical work is creative since it is just using a subset of all possible sequences.
That is what creativity IS. Picking subsets of all possible sequences.
Or, if you are a sculpturist, removing all the bits of rock that do not look like an elephant.
Re:Copyright works two ways (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but anyone who might sue implicitly ends their career (or at least dedicates it to the public domain) since the database contains anything they might write and they have already acknowledged it by suing.
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Nope! (Score:3)
Nope! Unlike patents, copyrights have to be based on knowledge of the previous work. If you could prove you never watched, heard about, etc, The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings or any work based on it, you could write your own story about Hobbits and be fine. ( But no one would believe you didn't know about Tolkein's work.)
Which means, you could let people make movies etc. about your Hobbit movie, even if its similar to the Hobbit/LoTR.
A more important issue is that it's not clear a computer generated melody is
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No, one of the fair use prong is if you are damaging the commercial value of the work you are allegedly infringing. Whether your own use is commercial or not can be used to infer if you are damaging the potential market for the work being infringed, but the fact that you are not making money yourself does not preclude enforcement (talk to all those regular folks that RIAA successfully sued).
Re:Hats off to these guys! (Score:4, Interesting)
Fair Use isn't something that exists in all countries, and even if it is, you can clearly be making fair use of material, and still get sued into the ground with a pack of rabid lawyers. Fair Use is only a real defense if you can still outlawyer the assholes, which most people can't afford.
By the way, the notes they got sued for weren't even the same ones, they just sounded similar to untrained ears, and IF I recall correctly, they still lost the lawsuit despite fair use and it not even being an actual duplicate of a tiny snippet of notes. (There are various videos from copyright lawyers and musicians on this case available on youtube. You can find the vids yourself if you have any interest.)
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It is in the Ted Talk, http://allthemusic.info/ [allthemusic.info]
Share and Enjoy!
Let's do same with software code (Score:2)
Re:Let's do same with software code (Score:5, Funny)
Perl Jam ;-)
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Let's do this for Drug molecules and Product names (Score:3)
Write out ever 13 letter english alphabet product name. Then every new product name will need to be like the symbol for Prince.
Does copyrighting a molecule require synthesis? If not then it should be possible to emit all possible Organic chemical formulas of a reasonable size.
Re: Let's do this for Drug molecules and Product n (Score:2)
How long will it last? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: How long will it last? (Score:2)
If they did that, the performance or editing could be crowdsourced. I don't think they could demand credentials for artists or editors, as that would exclude every up and coming artist.
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Copyright holding back the art is exactly the reason behind this story piece.
Negative 150 years (Score:2, Insightful)
It's cute and good PR stunt. I give them credit for that.
I can't write a song. If I wanted a jingle done I'd need to hire someone who can do that, probably a guy I know named Karl Rehn. Sure I can put random notes on paper, but that wouldn't be a good song. Just like writing a book - a cat walking on a keyboard can type letters, but you'd hardly call that a novel. Apparently it wouldn't actually be a song at all according to some definitions in music theory. Writing a good song is about *choosing* WHICH
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It's cute and good PR stunt. I give them credit for that.
I can't write a song. If I wanted a jingle done I'd need to hire someone who can do that, probably a guy I know named Karl Rehn. Sure I can put random notes on paper, but that wouldn't be a good song. Just like writing a book - a cat walking on a keyboard can type letters, but you'd hardly call that a novel. Apparently it wouldn't actually be a song at all according to some definitions in music theory. Writing a good song is about *choosing* WHICH notes to put, in which order.
Copyright protects creative work, artistic work. And the work here is artistically choosing from the billions of possible combinations. The people who did this stunt didn't artistically choose which notes, they only wrote down the fact of what all the possible combinations are. They aren't song writers until they find which of those hundred billion possible melodies is inspiring.
Now if they were to somehow sift through all of those possibilities and find a dozen that are uplifting, or soothing or whatever, and release those dozen as their songs, then they've done something copyright-eligible.
Nah.
In the current body of case studies, there is no requirement that a work has the subjective attribute of being inspirational.
Literally a dozen SCOTUS cases (Score:4, Insightful)
Creativity is actually the deciding factor in at least a dozen copyright cases decided by SCOTUS, never mind the thousands decided by lower courts.
Heck, it's even right there in the Constitution;
"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Enumerating every possible series of notes is not art and not authorship. Choosing arranging the notes for John Lennon's "Imagine" is. Blunt, Sacha Skarbek and Amanda Ghost engaged in art and authorship when they wrote "You're Beautiful". That's something I can't do.
As a programmer, I can easily write a "for" loop to enumerate all possible notes. I'm not a Grammy-award winning artist because I can't artistically, creatively, CHOOSE the notes.
Re:Literally a dozen SCOTUS cases (Score:5, Interesting)
This is clearly a creative work. If it wasn't, surely someone would have produced it long ago. If nothing else, it is a political statement expressed in a creative way and with significant human input into its production and would be copyrightable in that frame of reference.
Also, copyright is not restricted to "Grammy-award winning" "artists".
I did it Saturday (Score:2)
> if it wasn't, surely someone would have produced it long ago.
I've done it, more than once. They produced all possible bit strings in a given format up to a certain length. That's called counting. I've done it THIS WEEK actually, as part of some code to crack encryption.
I've you've ever counted, you've done what they did.
They also noted that bit strings can be interpreted as notes. Well that goes back to at least the 1970s.
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Heck, it's even right there in the Constitution;
"[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
If the end result can be easily and readily produced algorithmically, is it still a Useful Art?
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I suppose if it's "useful art" that depends on of it's useful and if it's art.
The usefulness. Ierating all possible bit strings (which can be understood to represent notes) isn't useful - my kindergartener already understands that every number is possible up to however many digits you want to go, and she already knows how to do it - how count. It's not useful that these people counted.
Is it artful - not so much, it's counting.
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As an example: there was a recent case about very high quality photographs of historically-important paintings. They were ruled not protected by copyright, while acknowledging the substantial technical skill required to make such photographs. However, no matter how impressive the technical achievement, it mattered not. I expect this will end up the same way: a technical achievement, not a creative work.
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There is a difference between writing a melody and arranging a song. They'll copyright the arrangement.
Re: Negative 150 years (Score:3)
They aren't song writers until they find which of those hundred billion possible melodies is inspiring.
While I mostly agree with the sentiment of your comment, this isn't entirely correct. Having studied the piano works of Bela Bartok as part of my misspent youth, I can attest to the fact that often the run of notes created by a composer or song-writer is complete and utter dross. In these cases it is left to the performer to turn the "music" written on the page into something musical.
In fact a good instrumentalist could probably turn all of the generated phrases into something at least listenable, and thi
It won't butt heads with the recording industry (Score:2)
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They don't need to, this is legally ridiculous and wouldn't get anywhere in court.
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It's no more ridiculous than a number of the cases that actually have gone to court.
My favorite is the case of George Harrison being sued for 3 notes, claiming that "My Sweet Lord" infringed on "He's So Fine". The case wound around the courts for over a decade. Meanwhile, ownershop of the copyright changes habds a few times and got bundled with portfolios. By the time the case was decided, Harrison owned both works, and so was ordered to pay himself.
A close second was
It's no more ridiculous than a number o
So they just infringed everyone's copyright (Score:3)
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Indeed. Unfortunately, the 3rd rated clowns passing for politicians have no interest in sane laws. They just want power.
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Your "real solution" is a nice idea but it requires persuading Congress (and possibly a president). What's your budget, in both dollars and decades? OTOH these guys were able to act on their own.
As for it infringing existing works, it sure looks like a clean room.
I think the real question is going to be whether or not its copyright will be viewed as legitimate, in the event of a $erious conflict. It likely follows the rules, but that doesn't mean some judge wouldn't call bullshit on it.
Depends on what you consider a melody (Score:3)
Is he claiming he generated every chord ever used, how about combinations of chords? There is a virtually endless combination of notes that will make music, only one of them will generate all the works of Beethoven.
If he has an algorithm that saves every piece of music in ~3TB with only references, then he has invented a new compression format which could be used to compress every piece of music, every piece of video in a rack of servers.
He generated every valid MIDI combination, but that does not make it a song.
Re:Depends on what you consider a melody (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends on what you consider a melody (Score:5, Informative)
The point is to stop the stupid copyright lawsuits which claim a few notes which sound similar to another melody of an existing song is copying.
This.
Remember George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" vs "“He’s So Fine [performingsongwriter.com]?”
The case finally came to trial in February 1976. Side by side, the two songs were painstakingly analyzed. “The plaintiff had huge charts made up with the three notes from Motif A and the four or five notes from Motif B drawn on them,” Harrison recalled. “And they talked about these for about three days, to the point where I started to believe that maybe they did own those notes.”
In the end, Harrison was found guilty of “subconscious plagiarism” and had to pay $1,599,987 of the earnings from “My Sweet Lord” to Bright Tunes (songwriter Ronnie Mack had died in 1963, shortly after “He’s So Fine” charted). “I’ve never had any money from the song,” Harrison later recalled. “It’s always been in escrow. As far as I’m concerned, the effect the song has had far exceeds any bitching between copyright people and their greed and jealousy.”
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Is he claiming he generated every chord ever used, how about combinations of chords? There is a virtually endless combination of notes that will make music, only one of them will generate all the works of Beethoven.
If he has an algorithm that saves every piece of music in ~3TB with only references, then he has invented a new compression format which could be used to compress every piece of music, every piece of video in a rack of servers.
He generated every valid MIDI combination, but that does not make it a song.
Where, in your narrative, is the reference to "melody?"
That part is crucial.
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Let's say we generate one bar of music, 8 steps, with 13 possible notes to choose from (silence included), that is 13^8 or 815,730,721 combinations.
This would be enough to cover basically all popular music. Just alter the timing and the melody is in the database..
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One bar isn't nearly enough to cover most melodies, and dividing each bar into 8 steps (assuming it's in 4/4 and excluding all other commonly used time signatures) isn't a fine enough granularity for timing. Certainly not enough for "basically all popular music".
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Timing is not copyrightable, only the melody. And the set of all melodies in 8 steps contains all melodies in less steps, so less common timings will apply. For melodies consisting of more than 8 steps, you can show all parts of that melody are in the public domain to handle plagiarism claims, and define your music as merely a remix of those elements. But that will need to be validated in a court of law.
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Timing is *part* of the melody.
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Read the summary. 8 note, 12 beat, single octave melodies.
Pop music is so repetitive that probably does catch a good number of them, but it's a long, long way from "all melodies."
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Citation needed.
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Is he claiming he generated every chord ever used, how about combinations of chords?
No, they're talking about melody and harmony, not every physically possible chord or chord combination - they've obviously excluded the discordant and non-harmonic, because those sound like crap to everyone.
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Melody does not include chords. A melodic line is a single voice (i.e., one note at a time).
They claim to have generated every 12-beat 8-note combination (8 notes in a normal scale, doe, rae, me, etc.). Exercise to the reader to figure out the size of that space. Note that they didn't include rests or less than single-beat tones, which is a potential shortcoming. They also didn't include accidentals (sharps, flats), which is a second potential shortcoming to achieve their goal.
But I have to wonder about
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The second part of that is true. The first part is not, as melodies usually outline chords, or at least imply them.
Compression to 1 bit feasible here (Score:2)
Given the sequential nature of this "work", it is possible to write an algorithm (read: repurpose the initial algorithm) that extracts this from a single bit. If the first bit is one, this algorithm is used, while if it is zero, some existing stock algorithm.
While you *could* compress to zero bits by dropping the second case, I'm not sure that would qualify as "compression" any more. (or, perhaps, a zero length file gives this output, while a positive length activates ye olde compression algorithm . . .)
"I'll be Bach" (Score:5, Interesting)
I always wondered why lawyers didn't mine classical music melodies when their clients were sued for copying contemporary works to show it already existed. I bet there's around a million different classical tunes put to paper, and western music is mostly based around a certain pattern such that close coincidental fits are in there to be found. Perhaps generating all the combinations is easier than digitizing existing paper notations, being OCR often needs manual clean-up.
Re:"I'll be Bach" (Score:5, Interesting)
Pachabel Rant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The melody of Pachabel's Canon in D has been used again, and again, and again, and again ...
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That's not enough. You'd need to show that your client knew of that melody beforehand and chose to adapt it into the new song, rather than independently creating the melody themselves (the more typical defense).
It's more difficult to document that, and more difficult to convince a client that it might be true, except in situations where a musician openly
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That's where claims of "subconscious infringement" come in. The claim that B must have heard A's song at some point, perhaps in the background, perhaps just someone humming the melody and copied it without being conscious of it (this has actually been argued in court).
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Why would you assume that the work was infringing upon the "original"? Independently created works are not infringing.
Why would you assume that the "duplicated elements" cannot be copyrighted? The requirement for copyright i
Re:"I'll be Bach" (Score:5, Informative)
Some songwriters did, and got caught by surprise on that - while Billy Joel's use of a Beethoven piano piece was fine, Eric Carmen thought Rachmaninoff was "Classical" and old and therefore in the public domain. He didn't realize the composer had only passed away in the 1940s, and so his piano works, which Carmen used as the basis for some hits like All By Myself, were still under copyright protection. Cost him quite a bit of royalties.
So that's the issue with just thinking "classical has done it already" is that many harmonic rules that a classical artist constrains themselves with in order to write a valid melody that has fitting transitions and modulations are still pretty modern. So whatever note combination you may be thinking of, it might be in Bach...but it might also have not shown up until Stravinsky (and therefore still under copyright). Western music didn't invent itself all at once, and Bach is not the be-all of western harmony. It was and is a continuous process of developing rules and chord changes that can allow for more striking melodic changes.
Sure, it's all fun and games for copyright (Score:2)
Until some Private Equity Fund offers "all the moneys", buys out their data, and starts enforcing copyrights and issuing takedown notices.
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That's why they released them to public domain using CC0.
Every possible one? (Score:2)
Sounds unlikely to me. Probably as many different melodies as there are stars in the universe.
Not a creative work, not copyrightable. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hitting every point in the space doesn't provide the de minimis creative effort needed to copyright something.
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Or, put in another medium, a solid block of marble contains every sculpture possible. Cutting away and reducing to a single work is the creative effort.
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Isn't the composition of hitting every point in space art in and of itself?
How about hitting no point in space?
How about John Cage's 4'33"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Is this art?
Re: Not a creative work, not copyrightable. (Score:2)
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IIRC it is because it was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence that was made in a certain way. If you make a similar amount of silence in a different way, yours is copyrightable as well so long as done in a minimally creative manner.
There is a very good (but long) article [sooke.bc.ca] on this phenomenon.
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It doesn't have to be copyrightable, it just has to exist.
Once it exists, no one else can copyright it, because they won't be able to claim authorship.
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The layout is copyrightable, the information contained therein is not.
It's the library of babel for music (Score:2)
Sufficient Subset (Score:5, Informative)
Their video is worth watching - the posts here about complexity theory miss the mark.
The authors here have brute-forced enough and long-enough melodies that a JUDGE, applying the standard set in the "Blurred Lines" case* would find every future melody infringing.
Exact length, meter, tempo, tune, and timbre are not required. A 5-second sample is enough to claim 100% of revenue with DMCA.
Now they need to prosecute, appeal, appeal, and lose. This will be very expensive. Hopefully they find a deserving target.
* which was ridiculous but is now case law in the US.
Copyrights != Patents (Score:4, Informative)
IAAL...
Copyrights are not patents, copyrights have independent creation exception, but there's no exclusive use and you can't just point to prior art. So you can't say: look it existed before and walk away if you're sued. All musicians say I didn't steal that melody, I come up with myself! The fight always centers around: Did you actually come up with it yourself or did you hear some other song and copy it. George Harrison vs. The Chiffons being a fine example.
Despite there being an alleged hard drive with every melody possible--that's still the exact same case. Now a defendant could say: I heard it on track 512,010,120 on this copyrighted hard drive that no one has heard of or listened to vs. on that song that there's a record of me listening to on Amazon or that was played on the radio.
I'm against imaginary property as the rest of the pitchfork bearing folk but I'm not sure what the point of this was and they should get off my lawn and news feed. Good publicity for ... something ... I guess. Oh look, there's a TED Talk, that always inspires confidence.
Originality does not require novelty (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless they can convince musicians to listen to this compilation prior to writing their next accused work, this will do nothing to reduce the problem. Even then, it doesn't defeat the problem because the key question is this: which will a jury believe was more memorable, one melody heard one time amongst a gigantic compolation of melodies, or that 1-2 bar hook that was part of that earlier popular song that the artist (just like everyone else) heard over and over in the media?
Copyright does not require novel expression, like a patent requires a novel device. Instead it requires something to be "original," as in not entirely copied or adapted from a previous source. If you independently come up with the same melody as another artist, your melody is neither unoriginal nor necessarily infringing.
Copyright infringement, conversely, requires both access and "unoriginality" (i.e., copying). You have to show access in an attempt to defeat originality -- if they didn't have access they couldn't possibly have copied from you -- and you have to show some evidence of copying -- either actual acts of copying or an inference of copying from substantial similarity between the alleged source and the alleged copy.
So long as one artist can claim that another artist had access to their work and that there is substantial similarity, the existence of this database changes very little. It only gives the defending artist a chance to claim that there was an alternate source for their melody, when most are already claiming that the actual source for their melody was their own creativity. Others may be claiming inspiration from an actual source that is in the public domain or otherwise not stridently protected, and this merely adds one (relatively implausible) source to that body of alternate material.
Timing / Rhythm? (Score:2)
I am not a musician, but isn't the timing between the notes also factor in what defines a melody? What about multiple notes, harmonics, etc.?
Conflicted on this (Score:2)
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Ok, now that they did this (Score:5, Funny)
Make them listen to it
WTF?! (Score:3)
This has *always* gone on.
You know Beethoven's Ode to Joy? 4th movement, 9th symphony? Stolen from Mozart's K.222 Twice. Because before the 9th, Ludwig loosely-ish wrote it as the Choral Fantasy (that one right there is a mind-breaker, I so love that piece)
Handel's Messiah? Stole from himself, from Concerto a Due Cori
A Whiter Shade of Pale? Stolen from Bach.
This is ridiculous bullshit is what it is, --- not what our enterprising fellas did here, what's bullshit is the suing of even remotely approximating someone else's melody.
Hmmm I’ve seen this before (Score:2)
Chess analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
This situation reminds me of chess. In particular, how it is basically impossible to get to about 8-10 moves into a game without either a) repeating what somebody else has done before; or b) putting yourself into an already lost position. There is a youtube channel I watch (agadmator) where he explicitly notes, when running through a recent match, the point at which 'we have a completely new game', and it is usually somewhere around 10-12 moves in. With music, it is likewise unreasonably hard to come up with an ~8-note phrase which is both a) musically appealing; and b) original. Basically without going down the weirdness that is 12-tone row stuff from the early 20th century, it is impossible to come up with a new tune that doesn't have superficial similarities to tunes that have come before. Consider the number of tunes which borrow heavily from Pachabel's Canon in D. Going back to the chess analogue, all the sensible openings have been done before, and even have names. If the copyright system were implemented in chess, it would basically be illegal to play any sensible opening, and would ruin the game. Likewise I think copyright is harming music more than it should.
Their next task ... (Score:2)
should be to generate every possibly lyric. That might be large, but need not be more than a collection of verses that new songs will be similar enough to.
8 notes and 12 beats is not nearly enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming you include the octave, 8 notes will only allow you to use a single 7-note scale (e.g. the minor or major scale, but not both; any alternative scales/modes, or melodies with accidentals, are not covered in the search space). 12 notes would have made more sense.
And of course 12 beats doesn't even cover a single bar of music, in many cases. 16 beats would have been better.
Let's look at some examples: The opening bassline of Queen's "Under Pressure", which was famously lifted by Vanilla Ice, requires 16 beats to define. It won't be found anywhere on this hard drive.
Let's try "Hey Jude". Here's how much of the melody would be covered in the search space: "Hey Jude, don't make it ba..." (Not even enough to finish the word "bad").
The reasons they did it this way are obvious: They wanted everything to fit on a hard drive. If you only searched 9^12 permutations, which assumes "silence" was an option as well as the 8 notes (not sure if they actually did that), you get about 282 billion melodies. If you search 13^16 permutations? That's about 660 million billion melodies. You'd need a lot of hard drives.
It's all kind of moot, since this is obviously a publicity stunt/conceptual art project, but the programmers cannot really claim to have generated all possible melodies-- or even one-bar fragments of all possible melodies. They're off by factor of about 2 million.
Clever, but not how it works.... (Score:3)
Copyright law is unlike patent law. In patent law, if you invent the same thing that somebody else did without referring to their original, you've infringed the patent.
In copyright law, if you create the same thing that somebody else did without referring to their original, you have not infringed their copyright.
It's called the "Doctrine of Independent Creation." If I have never had any contact with the Harry Potter Universe and then write book about a school of witchcraft and wizardry based on a British boarding school with a protagonist who didn't know he was a wizard, then I have not infringed JK Rowling's copyright. It doesn't matter that she thought it all up first -- as long as I did it independently, then I'm not an infringer.
Doesn't matter (Score:3)
This is a funny stunt, but nothing more. It doesn't actually accomplish anything under the law. Though perhaps it may still be helpful in getting more people to recognize how silly copyright has gotten and in spurring copyright reform.
First, it likely doesn't expose the folks behind it to liability. This is because a key requirement for copyright infringement is "copying." That is, using the work that is alleged to have been infringed in an infringing way. The simplest example would be someone who copies a book by xeroxing it. The act of copying hinges on having a copy of the book to copy from.
Because of the copying requirement, copyright has a nominal (if rarely used) doctrine of independent creation. If two works are identical but there is no copying, there is no infringement.
It's easy when the defendant in an infringement suit admits to copying a work, or was caught red-handed and the question is simply whether the plaintiff is the right person to sue and whether the copying was actually infringing. Here, there is no question: by generating every possible combination of a few notes methodically, there was no copying. Similarities to existing works are coincidental.
Second, for the same reason -- copying -- it's of no help to future defendants, and to see why let's discuss the harder case, where a plaintiff has to prove that their work was copied without it being an open and shut case. The way to prove that copying probably happened, because in a copyright suit you only need to prove that something is more likely than not, is to show (1) that the defendant had access to the work and (2) that the works are substantially similar
Access means having a reasonable opportunity to have access to the work, not just in the sense that anything is possible. If the work is popular and widely available in stores, available in the mass media, etc., access is pretty well established.
Substantial similarity is just that -- of the part of the new work that is claimed to have been copied from the old work, how similar are they? The more similar, the more likely that there was copying. Further, there is an inverse relationship between access and similarity in that if a work is easy to access not much similarity needs to be shown, but if a work is unlikely to have been accessed, a lot of similarity needs to be shown.
Here, while there is nominally access to this archive of melodies for everyone, if you're a judge and a work is alleged to either have been copied from A Generic 2020s Pop Song a la Bojack Horseman or from melody number 53852 in this archive, it seems unlikely -- barring some fairly persuasive evidence -- that the infringer was perusing the melody archive looking for something to copy. If you can't prove copying from a safe public domain source, and most people won't be able to despite the existence of the archive, it's useless as a defense.
Third, for the same reason, future successful songwriters are unlikely to be accused of copying their own melodies from the archive. If they did though, they would not be able to copyright the melody they used; copyright only applies to one's own creative contributions. But the archive creators couldn't claim infringement by the successful songwriters, both because they were not creative in generating every possible melody from those notes up to a certain length, and also because they put any copyrights they might have had into the public domain.
So this archive is funny, but not really relevant for anything except as propaganda. And we could use copyright reform, so maybe there'll be something to that.
So in short.. (Score:3)
To summarise, Two guys develop an algorithm to create melodies to copyright, then release those to the public domain to protect artists against copyright claims from other artists that claim derivative works against songs which are likely derivative works from other songs and melodies?!
My head hurts, No wonder this world is heading down the plug hole :(
Re: (Score:2)