Copyrighting melodies to avoid accidental infringement [video]

The video shows that the authors wrote a program to enumerate every possible melody up to a certain size, possibly narrowed by some criteria. A list like that should be as entitled to copyright protection as a list of the first million prime numbers.

Where an algorithm is used as a tool for creativity, I agree that the resulting work should be copyrightable because an algorithm can be like a brush in the hands of an artist. Here, however, that is not the case because the algorithm used simply lists all melodic possibilities and there is no creative input whatsoever.

Bridgeman is specifically about imaging artworks. You're taking it way out of context. Here's the summary from wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...:

"...exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright in the United States because the copies lack originality."

That has nothing to do with satellite images. If you disagree I would ask you to cite jurisprudence or legislation.

You haven't addressed the fact that google/bing/any other GIS tool specifically put copyrights on their satellite images.

From the wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth:

"Every image created from Google Earth using satellite data provided by Google Earth is a copyrighted map. Any derivative from Google Earth is made from copyrighted data which, under United States Copyright Law, may not be used except under the licenses Google provides"

If this is not correct you should edit it accordingly.

From a purely moral perspective this argument just makes the entire situation even worse. Individuals should not be able to own culture. Culture is collective, and culture ought to have the freedom to build on top of itself.

I have never had anyone explain copyright to me in a way that made internally consistent sense, and I have come to believe that the reason for that is because it doesn't make internally consistent sense. People either give explanations that don't stand up to mechanical scrutiny, or they give explanations that don't stand up to moral scrutiny. Usually both.

Copyright does make sense from the perspective of, "we want to incentivize a behavior, so we have arbitrarily decided to artificially monopolize certain things to incentivize it." When you try to break copyright down into something more inherent or natural, the structure falls apart because (I'm convinced) there's nothing there to examine. It's just an incentive structure, and that's the only level we should be discussing it on. It's absurd to claim that any individual has an inherent, moral property right over culture; their only moral right to culture is to participate within it -- ironically, the very right that copyright restricts!

Hacks like music databases don't get around copyright by exploiting its inner mechanisms. The point isn't to out-argue judges, it's to showcase that copyright isn't an internally consistent, naturally occurring right.

> And the Cage estate doesn't own the copyright on silence - it owns the copyright on silence framed within certain applications in certain cultural contexts.

Which is similarly bonkers, just with more words added. The Cage estate doesn't own anything: we have temporarily granted them an unnatural monopoly over a certain kind of cultural expression in the hopes that it will somehow posthumously encourage John Cage to write more.

No. Capitalism works when people are equals, which is why we need a strong Democracy and brakes on unchecked money-earning optimisation. We must maximise people's freedom to create.

Personally the form of copyright I would support would be something like

1. Sharing without direct monetary gain is allowed. The reason I don't see a problem with this is because we already have a vibrant piracy culture and yet people want to pay creators. As long as you're not getting paid for warez it doesn't seem like it would be a problem in itself. Ad-supported torrent index sites would also be OK because they're not profiting off the warez themselves, they're just providing a search index. This is basically updating libraries to the 21st century.

2. As a creator you own an exclusive right to your creations and you cannot give that right away. So if you write a song as a "work for hire", you can still sample the song you wrote. You can change it and release it on your own. If you are a programmer, you cannot have your code taken away. If you write e.g. a UI component and then decide you want to make your own site, you can still use that UI component freely. Of course you can give a permanent non-exclusive license to your employer to do whatever they want with your code/song/dance/performance/etc.

This will maximise the freedom to create, minimise exploitation of artists and knowledge workers, and maximise the freedom to share culture, while still affording creators enough protection to make sure others aren't unduly profiting from their creations.

I'm not sure about the length of copyright though. The easy thing would be to say it should be 10 years, with exponentially increasing renewal fees, but I'm not sure that's the best idea. Another option is compulsory licensing, where someone who profits from your work has to pay you a fee proportional to how much of his creation uses how much of your creation. That idea has some gnarly enforcement problems however, and I suspect big companies will just tread over little guys who can't litigate anyway.

And the simple fix to 'eternal lock' is cutting copyright duration back toward 14+14.

Where do you think that return on investment will come from if the product is free?

For better or worse this is literally what record labels and publishers do - invest in new talent, handle marketing and promotion, spread the investment around and hope to win big on a handful of hits which pay for the misses.

Do you really think tech VCs invented this model?

Publisher/investors/labels/agents/promoters have been doing it since at least the 19th century.

You asked " Why does it matter if someone else makes money on something they copied? Isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?"

And I answered that question. It matters, because in the context of capitalism, no, you can't abandon the idea of making money for the original creator, because there's investment. Very few people are interested in investments that don't stand a good chance of recouping the costs.

Investors aren't going to give you money if creation is expensive, and copying is zero cost. (See also: Open source business models)

People aren't going to invest time (on the order of many years) in learning skills if there isn't a chance to recoup that cost.

Sorry if the answer to your question doesn't take the discussion where you want it to be. That doesn't make it a less valid answer. If you want a different discussion, maybe you're asking the wrong question?

edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe artists are entitled to total control over something they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to license it as creative commons and go live in a wine cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money) it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such exploitation of intellectual property and provides no safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to extract value from what they have available to them.

Without copyright, competition would not be for the ability to create -it would be for the ability to distribute. The end result would be much the same as we have now - an oligopoly of distribution channels, only they'd pay the artists less, if anything.