Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.
The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years. The current state of music copyright law is an absolute joke, and deserves to be "disrupted" (destroyed).
You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.
Yes that’s actually the entire point of this
A lot of commenters seem to be missing the fact that this is a response to ridiculous arguments being used in winning court cases
Again we see programmers trying to understand the law in terms of ‘how can a piece of data be illegal?’ while the law is quite happily focusing on making specific actions illegal.
‘You can’t arrest me, gold bars aren’t illegal!’ ‘Yes, but carrying them out of the federal reserve vault without permission is.’
That's the problem with IP law.
In effect you give people monopoly on numbers. When the numbers are big nobody is bothered by this, because chance of arriving at the exact same one is effectively zero. But for songs the numbers are pretty small (depending on the encoding used to compare the songs), and the absurdity is evident.
i.e. sans lyrics
> Generally, a plaintiff proves copying through circumstantial evidence, showing that the defendant had access to the copyrighted work [...] > > [...] unlike in patent law, if a defendant independently creates the substantially similar work, he is not liable to the copyright holder.
https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-wil...
The fact there is no garbage data at all shows that they are doing judgement on a nakedly wrong level in music - even by the standards of copyright.
Selling "Harry Potter but with the capitalization inverted" to dodge book copyright nor even "this key and this very long block of data which happen to decrypt to the complete works of JK Rowling, don't decrypt because that would be infringement wink wink nudge nudge".
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
If we say that music (and really any information) is just numbers which can be enumerated automatically, then surely the creative action is finding and picking a number which is actual interesting out of the infinite sea of random garbage.
My point is that framing music as "just numbers" does not disprove that producing a song is a unique creative work. There may be valid arguments against copyright, but this one isn't.
Your example is barely plausible, much less demonstrable.
The connection between "original works" using an extremely limited set of notes, and your right to privacy using some theoretical predictive algorithm is not at all obvious.
In some sense, looking at information as being exclusionary and as being inclusive are the same thing, but there's a lot of ways in which the former actually makes more sense as a thought framework.
And in this particular context we can see how that plays out... a list of all possible melodies of a given nature actually has very little information in it, because it doesn't exclude enough. It may superficially seem to our human senses that a lot of stuff has been included/constructed, but in reality, the 'list of every possible melody' is a vapor. There's not actually anything there. It is the act of exclusion of possibilities that leads to interesting information. Such information as this list has is contained in its specification of what a "melody" is. Counterintuitively (to a lot of people's understanding), if they widened the specifications, while they would end up with a bigger list they'd end up with less information in the result.
The act of creating a song isn't a matter of creating the possibilities from the raw nothingness, it's a matter of carving them out of the exponentially-large space of possibilities and finding something there useful. The exponentially-large space is so large that it is very easy to not see it that way, because, I mean, it's huge. It doesn't feel like "removing" possibilities the way carving a 3D stone does ("I remove everything that doesn't look like my desired statue"), because the exponential space is so inexpressibly larger, and we need fundamentally different tools to address such a space, but in the end, it's the same thing.
While this isn't what the law was written for necessarily, the "creativity" requirement here could be very easily pressed into service here. They've expressed very little creativity/exclusion on this list and it would be easy to argue it falls far below the threshold necessary for copyright. As a literary criticism of the system, it is successful and thought provoking... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely.
The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all—so the mere fact that two songs use the same melody is not sufficient to show that one is a copy of the other. The set of melodies that are compatible with human ascetics is even smaller. They don't actually need these auto-generated melodies to qualify for copyright for the project to succeed. It works equally well if similarity in melody is not considered sufficient evidence of copyright infringement.
Even just having the database around so that one can say that they copied the melody from here rather than from some other source might be enough. After all, unlike patents, independently producing something similar to a copyrighted work is not infringement; you have to have actually copied from the other work. If you're a musician perhaps you should listen to a few randomly-selected melodies from this program each day. Maybe it will spark something, but even if it doesn't it will at least make it harder to argue that whatever melody you come up with could only have been "subconsciously copied" from some other composer's song you may have heard decades ago.
How does that follow? You can enumerate any finite number. And the article doesn't say how big. Is it a thousand or a trillion? "Riehl says the algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.". The article doesn't say how many seconds it took to generate all melodies though.
Not within a fixed time period in the real world. You're limited by the matter and energy available, and by the speed of light. However we're not talking about the theoretical ideal limits of computation. The upper bound would be 300k melodies for each second since the program was written—68.7 billion in all, according to the Adam Neely interview linked from the Press page of the project site. Which is a lot, but then there are hundreds of millions of known songs, each of which is likely to contain multiple melodies, some of which are much more likely to be chosen than others. Accidental duplication is thus quite likely.
Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet!
The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.
But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).
At the risk of getting stuck in a loop: "No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony"
> and if you only care about melody it's overestimation
And they did it that way because courts don't worry about the exact tempo, meter and rhythm when ruling on plagiarism.
There was a guy trying to copyright A CHORD :)
That much is true.
> a guy trying to copyright A CHORD
IIRC he failed miserably.
A better example would be the (until recently) coprighted song "Happy Birthday." [1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...
... but that doesn't mean copyright and patent aren't a perpetual battle against the "natural" arrangement of idea, and absurdities are extremely possible when the law is misinterpreted or mis-structured.
Who "generally agree"s on this? The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.
But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does.
There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talking seriously about just burning the whole copyright / patent system to the ground. At least a subset of the countries in the groups listed are generally understood to have representative governments.
Yeah, that's the assumption I take issue with.
Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it was proposed in the US constitution. However, because a tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference you get the modern mess of unending copyright.
If tiny minority + 'society' is the entirety of the system, then that's true, but there are also plenty of players who lose out due to restrictive IP regimes—and it's hard to quantify the extent of those losses. (Whether or not the benefits they would reap from looser IP are appropriate or fair is beside the question for utilitarian computations.)
You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone.
In essence, you've just described Kickstarter's business model.
Basically, even if individual bacteria are unnoticed enough of them can kill you.
What would be the point of a patent system with unlimited duration? If we wanted that, we could just have companies not reveal their inventions in the first place
I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability.
On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted.
Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or want financial compensation.
I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.
In terms of public opinion, it would be interesting to know what studies have been done. I imagine if you would get broad support for an author copyrighting a book, and less on patenting a pre-existing genetic sequence.
As another unsubstantiated claim, I think if you sat down with the general public and the criteria for patents, they would mostly agree.
The challenge has to do with implementing them and the legal process around them.
If a crappy patent is issued to large corporation, it is incredibly expensive to challenge them.
Basically, America's crazy overreach forces our laws onto other nations - this is actually one thing that really frustrates me about corporate tax loopholes, that overreach could be trivially used to force better international standards for corporate VAT taxes there just isn't the political will (due to lobbying) to get it done.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...
Some might say lumping trademark, copyright, patent and trade secret laws (historically and in practice very different things) under one heading called "intellectual property" is an intentional strategy to muddy the waters and cloud any argument.
In the latter case, there's also no real risk of accidentally stomping on that.
The claim in this particular case is that they really have generated the entire possible melody space. Legally I think it's likely to fail on multiple levels if it is ever challenged, but part of the point is that some of those failures should also be applied to some real copyright suits that have been won.
(It is somewhat ironic that the music industry continues to be so upset about copyright even as they appear to be converging on The One True Pop Song at speed. Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less.)
Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrighted, unable to be used without license.
I would question any legal professional's authoritative standing to even advise on copyright of a work of music if they miscategorize a recording of ambient sound as a performance of a musical scoring consisting entirely of silence. The copyright doesn't apply to the ambient sound, but to the long quiessence of an artist at their instrument.
It demonstrates a complete blindness of the negative space of music, and a positivistic bias that has no place being enshrined in our legal system.
It's not just the music industry. The whole economy starts to feel like overfitting the profit function.
That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever you want, and you'll still be publically performing 4'33".
The rather humorous outcome, if one asks me, is that anyone who writes in 4 beats of silemce into a score should be violating copyright if we're going to be consistent.
That kind of thing is completely unenforceable with respect to performances, but in written musical notation, copying the specific notation pattern could be infringement. If you write "4/4, tempo 80, 91-measure rest", that's maybe violating the 4'33" copyright. If you write a score for a full band or orchestra that shows rests in each measure for each instrument, with key changes and tempo changes and such, you're just retelling the same joke in a different way.
Usually short phrases aren’t supposed to be protectable under copyright. However, when a defendant blatantly appropriates a well-known literary phrase for a commercial purpose like selling unlicensed merchandise, courts may make an exception.
[there actually are musicians that specialise in recording backing tracks intended to resemble a particular popular recording which aren't that recording for use in commercial products, but they tend not to get sued...]
Related: The Supreme Court ruled that excerpting a single paragraph from a 454-page book can be copyright infringement. The book was Gerald Ford's memoirs, the one paragraph was his reasoning for pardoning Nixon. The Court's reasoning was more-or-less that nobody cared about anything else Ford did, so excerpting the one paragraph was as good as giving the whole book away for free.
Whether a work in question is even eligible for protection at all is a distinct legal question.
The question in play is how much of of the copyrighted work may be reproduced before it is infringement.
Of course not every set of four notes or eleven letters in a copyrighted work is prohibited; the significance and context of the use matters.
:)
However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way).
So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here (is ZIP allowed? is TAR allowed? what about more sophisticated like PAQ? and what about this Rust code?). This is what I/we discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441328
It doesn't matter at all. As 'patio11 correctly points elsewhere in the thread[0], this question boils down to the colour of the bits.
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A melody contains more than a sequence of tones. The most heartless definition would at the very least include rhythm. For every sequence of tones they output, they only produce one out of hundreds of possible melodies for that sequence.
It is of course an interesting thought to consider the definition of decompression, but on the other hand, we should also limit the contributed idiocy to the bare minimum required to break the relevant idiotic rules.
> So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here
If you compress, you can copyright the compressed bytes.
If you don't compress, you can copyright the uncompressed bytes.
As far as that copyright extending to derivations, e.g. decompressions, the answer indeed situation-dependent. For example, converting a copyrighted font from TTF to WOFF does not remove the copyright. But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright. (Sorry I don't have a reference; probably findable.)
The "self-extracting zip" derivation would probably fall into the latter category; that is, the copyright would not transfer.
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But even if the copyright were maintained during your advanced decompression, one could argue that editing down to very specific portion of that extremely large body of work was a substantive/transformational derivation, which they could then copyright themselves.
Transformative works are very common in art. The most famous example is Duchamp simply adding a mustache to a print of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and copyrighting that. [1]
I hope nobody takes this as legal advice; I'm not a lawyer but I'm fairly certain it's wrong. The font would still be the same work.
It comes down to this: Typefaces/glyphs are not copyrightable. The font code that produces those glyphs is.
> Typefaces cannot be protected by copyright in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer)...However, there is a distinction between a font and a typeface. The machine code used to display a stylized typeface (called a font) is protectable as copyright. [1]
In software, a similar "black-box" derivation process has happened many times, e.g. UNIX/GNU. Copyrights applies to software source code, but not software functionality.
Determining what is the "essential, creative work" in each case in a nuanced way is a matter for courts and armies of lawyers: Apple round corners, Oracle Java APIs, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti...
(But yes, I do agree that typefaces are exceptionally commonly distributed.)
However the example here, and the situation with fonts seem different. It is the case that font data is viewed as utilitarian and uncopyrightable. So we have a copyrightable program, producing uncopyrightable data. The argument here seems that we have a copyrightable program producing copyrightable data.
One of the items they were trying to point out, often abused in lawsuits for pop music, is the idea of "Access". If you came up with an idea all by yourself, but a similar song exists that is popular enough, the court argues that just by there being the possibility that you heard it, you therefore definitely heard it and then copied it.
If this music set exists, and is freely available, shouldn't it be considered that you had reasonable access to it and therefore stole it? No, of course not, that would be a ridiculous assumption and so is the current outlook of a song being popular being enough proof that you stole the idea.
Not to mention, music is extremely formulaic. Chord progressions have a natural tendency to certain forms, with centuries of prior art, rhythm within genres of music is often the same, even melodies have a trend toward particular combinations (leading tones over chord progressions bring about lots of similar sounding solos).
Any musician trying to claim copyright for their music should remember that their song only exists on the back of centuries of musical exploration. Consider how much of the song you can say is truly novel, it's going to be nearly nothing.
The combination of lyrics + chords + melody is in my opinion, the absolute minimum you need to claim a song has been copied. Lyrics are derivative, melodies are derivative, chord progressions are derivative, but together they have the chance to be a unique combination.
Sufficiently advanced “proving a point via absurdity to make a more general argument” is indistinguishable from satire.
I am not a musician, but which of these are copied in the Tom Petty / Sam Smith case that motivated this exercise? To my untrained ear, I do hear some similarities in the relative lengths of the notes (meter?).
I found a side-by-side comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflFw9T77FQ
If these two songs are similar enough, then I think it could be argued that a MIDI sequence has been copied, since in both cases it requires a significant change of tempo and key. A lot of commenters seem to be missing this point: yes, the generated sequences sound different from real songs, but so do the songs involved in the ridiculous court cases. Radiohead and Ed Sheeran were sued for chord progressions, Katy Perry for a melody. The songs involved were altered about as much as the MIDI sequences would need to be to show the similarities.
And apparently arpeggios, because the US District Court of California ruled in Flame vs Katy Perry that arpeggios are "melodic enough" for copyright protection.
A combination of chords, melody, rhythm are I think the only reasonable measure that a song has been copied.
If I take the entire melody of a Beatles song, including the verse and chorus, but set it to an entirely different chord progression, would the court recognize that as an original song? What if I lifted all of the lyrics as well?
Do you have a book that you would recommend to learn about these terms?
Melody is the horizontal arrangement of notes for an individual voice or instrument over time. Harmony is the vertical arrangement of notes sounding at the same time, and how those transform horizontally over time as a group. Tempo is the speed in beats per minute of the background 'pulse' of the music.
Now, asking for a music theorist to give you an algorithmic definition of how to make music with any of the above? Good luck ;)
I honestly know nothing about music so this is all gibberish to me. But I'd be interested to learn if anyone has a book recommendation.
"Learn music theory in half an hour" is obviously an exaggeration, but it really comes astoundingly close to fulfilling that promise. It contains a lot of information and each part builds on the previous parts, so it requires focus and maybe a few repetitions to 'get it', but I think the approach is fantastic for showing how many ideas of music theory are deeply connected.
Not a book as you requested, but hopefully you'll find the other reply useful. As for some of your specific questions:
Frequency is the same concept as radio frequency, but in this case refers to something we can directly sense. Radios transmit electromagnetic waves, which are photons moving at a certain rate, measured in Hertz, or cycles per second. Sound frequency refers to movement of air waves, so a more accurate analogy than radio waves is waves in a pond when a rock is thrown in. Human ears are sensitive to frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, so any sound you hear is a combination of frequencies. Natural language is helpful here, since higher frequencies sound 'higher' and lower frequencies sound 'lower'.
A tone is a sound at a specific frequency, also known as a note. For example, 440 Hz is designated as the note A4 by the Geneva conventions, and this is what most instrument tunings are based off.
Twelve tone equal temperament is the tuning system nearly all modern Western music uses. Certain ratios of frequencies sound pleasant, especially ratios with small numbers, such as 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4. So if we know 440 Hz is a note in the system, it would be nice to also have 587 Hz, 660 Hz, and 880 Hz. However, these frequencies will only really sound good when played with that original 440 Hz, not necessarily with each other. So instead of using them exactly, we approximate them in a useful way. The 1:2 ratio, the octave, is generally considered to be the most important, so that ratio is kept, but otherwise the notes are equally spaced (human hearing is logarithmic), or equally tempered. The most popular tuning system has twelve tones. There's no note at 660 Hz, but there's one at 659 Hz, which is pretty close, and there happens to be one at 587 Hz. Other ratios are also represented reasonably well.
A key is a collection of notes that sound good together, based on the ratios of their frequencies. The alternative would be chromatic composition, where all 12 notes are used and none is obviously 'more important'. Most music is in a specific key, but uses some chromatic notes to make the melody more interesting.
I actually had to look up what the difference between a key and a scale is, as I thought the terms were pretty much interchangeable. I've edited the last part of my other comment to reflect this:
A scale is actually an ordered set of notes belonging to a key. A key is just an unordered collection of notes. I got this wrong earlier.
So playing all the notes belonging to C major in ascending order is playing a scale, and playing the notes in any order is playing in the key of C.