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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Hackers have this idea that they can hack the law. However, judges are not computer programs blindly following the written instructions of the law. They are expected to apply "judgement" when resolving these cases, and they are likely to not be impressed by this effort. I suspect this will have the same effect as if a bunch of people got together and released a massive public domain dictionary and then claimed that authors could not bring copyright claims anymore because all the words they used were in the public domain dictionary.

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You _can_ hack the law, just not in the ways that people unfamiliar with law think they can. For instance, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made huge strides for gender equality by arguing for male plaintiffs in discrimination cases to set precedents that would later be used to argue for women's rights. It's less about sneaking loopholes past a judge and more about using the court's own procedure/reasoning to push a certain judgement. If this case can set some precedent about how melodies like this are not protected because of their simplicity, or due to the fact that they can be trivially enumerated, the precedent could possibly be used to strengthen copyright defense cases involving claims over a simple melody.

They are not hacking the law. They are pointing out its absurdity.

The problem with that analogy is that the complexity of melodies and sentences are far from equivalent. A melody is much closer to the complexity of a word. Copyright trolls have been getting away with suing artist who have created original works due to a small section of melody sounding too similar to another work. To use the same analogy, that is like an author claiming copyright infringement, because you used a word that uses too many of the same letters as their own.

    possible 12 beat melodies (1 octave) = 8^12 = ~6.9e10

    possible 8 letter words = 26^8 = ~2.1e11

    (Assume there are 170,000 known words.)
    possible 12 word sentences = (1.7e5)^12 = ~5.8e62

Edit: Used the correct numbers from the article and updated the word/sentence length to be comparable.

Yet tax evasion methods such as the double Irish are considered perfectly acceptable. Given many such cases like this, it feels as if the judges do not have a just standard of when they are and aren't impressed.

Good lawyers "hack" the law all the time. They find novel uses and interpretations for things that exist. The hack here isn't some absolute negation of all copyright claims, but now that all (intraoctave) melodies definitively exist, people suing that they "created" a melody will need to find an even more clever argument that holds up now that it is known to already exist.

For example, hopefully these guys will publish their work on a music service, otherwise it might be argued that they simply created numbers and not music, which a judge could realistically be expected to differentiate.

> I suspect this will have the same effect as if a bunch of people got together and released a massive public domain dictionary and then claimed that authors could not bring copyright claims anymore because ...

They could claim that as much as I can claim that this sentence I just cited ^ above belongs to me, it wouldn't change the reality of things that you supposedly wrote it.

We are talking about the combined work of a dictionary and not the individual words right? Because let's say Wiktionary was in public domain and not CC BY-SA, then if Elsevier went ahead and said that they had copyrighted this material (because it belongs to no-one in particular) and sued Wikimedia Foundation for publishing Wiktionary pages. Would that lead to plausible "judgement" and whoever got more money for lawyers would win? I'm speculation off course, hence the questions and I'm not actually familiar with the American copyright system.

I.e. You can summarize, you can quote, and you can paraphrase, but if you copy the thing in it's entirety, bind it, and sell it as a production of that work, you've violated copyright. If you copy the entire literary content, but leave out all the other trademarks, illustrations, etc, you'd still be likely to be held in violation of copyright as long as the amount of word for word reproduction of these original text in an unaltered form approached unity.

However, as far as I'm aware, you could technically get away with reproducing another book in it's entirety if you quoted every piece it of it, but there were other substantial chunks of content around said quotes. This hasn't typically been done for practical reasons, (as you'd arguably have two books worth of content in one), but would still technically just slide in as fair use as far as I am aware. Though I'm fairly certain anyone would just encourage someone seriously attempting to do that to just get permission, or publish a standalone work with references to a particular edition of the work in question.

The absurdity with music related copyright infringement is that the copyright holders assert they own a copyright to the underlying melody. The foundation of the composition if you will. It should encompass the work as a whole. Either that or the particular scoring. The example I gave above of a book that reproduces another book as part of it's composition would roughly parallel another song composed with the same underlying melody. A book containing a repro of a book in the sense of set theory is still a different composition than the original work. So too should be music.

Unless I'm flawed or unaware of some extra nuance about these things.

Quoting generally limits you to 10-20% of the entire work quoted, and you must add a lot of detail to justify those quotes. You could maybe get around it by writing 100 books each that quote 1%.

Even then you might get into trouble if it can be shown your quotes are in order and thus you didn't apply any creative effort in choosing it. (out of order with page references so it can be assembled might be fine).

All of the above with a ton of maybe. It all depends on factors that are not entirely settled and subject to change.

>All of the above with a ton of maybe. It all depends on factors that are not entirely settled and subject to change.

That's the part I object to frankly.

For a second I had a hope that there were actually guidelines that helped clarify it, but even with the 10%-20% rule, yet if one managed to write and publish an entire set of pages enumerating every semantically correct page, we'd again be in the same problem.

As the process of creation becomes more available to the everyman, I can see that copyright is going to be a thornier and thornier issue. Especially if smaller and smaller chunks are going to be deemed as an acceptable basis for infringement without taking into account that the commonality of those smaller chunks being allegedly infringed upon must have the quality of being arranged in reference to every other part of the composition as a whole as well to count as an infringement of you're even attempting to achieve a reasonable outcome of copyright. Which means that you couldn't claim infringement merely for the presence of a work in another, which I'm fairly certain copyright holders would find unsatisfying because it would sharply curtail the value proposition represented by going after people for purportedly "infringing" in hopes of garnering a settlement, which is what it seems has become the norm rather than the exception in IP circles nowadays.

You can hack that judgement with money.

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