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Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them".

So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not?

They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive.

What if some future compressor (future ZIP format) is clever enough to see that you are going to save all possible permutations of something, and then saves this is a much better compressed way. Then suddenly when compressors do this, it means when you use such a compressor, you do not have copyright on the data anymore?

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Very true.

I think the focus has to be on the spirit not the technology. Saying to a lawyer/judge/jurist "hey, this script can generate every possible melody!" _feels_ quite different from saying "every single melody is already written down, on this hard-drive I am waving at you! Look!"

Tangent: reminds me of the Hutter Prize for compression (hey, they prize pot recently increased to €500K and I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any votes http://prize.hutter1.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutter_Prize).

Takes any algorithm that can generates the digits of pi. It is proven that all the sequences of digits are present somewhere in these digits. Can you claim copyright on all the books of the universe because you can show the algorithm that can generate every possible books ?

"It is proven that all the sequences of digits are present somewhere in these digits"

This has never been proven for the digits of π. Of course, there are other digit-sequences for which it is trivially true. For example, just concatenating together every finite sequence of digits, in some suitable order.

I stand corrected. For pi, it is only a conjecture. My point remains true for "Champernowne sequence".

Without being any kind of copyright expert, this argument doesn't make much sense. If you have the relevant indices into pi, I guess you could claim copyright. The index will be much larger than the original book though. Essentially you have a really bad compression algorithm. I'm not going to get very far claiming that because my decompression algorithm could output any sequence, all sequences are mine.

It has already been done (even though it is only a conjecture):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13869691

So in other words you need to have used the compressor to compress what you are copyrighting, and that which you used it on must have been physically stored in its entirety. Is it provable that this all occurred, if there's no requirement to still have the original? It would require that you also supply the compressor to the court, so that somebody can use your self-extracting magic decompressor, recompress the result, and end up back in the same place. But you could make your compressor simply emit your decompressor, ignoring the input!

It is to avoid FUD. It ensures no one can derail the conversation into a debate about what constitutes being ‘affixed to a physical medium’.

“But are the tunes really affixed to the medium?”

“Yes, this hard drive in my hand literally contains a bunch of MP3 files” is a lot stronger than: “Yes, in a way, because this tune-generating script technically constitutes a self-extracting archive, your honour.”

Presumably musicians/composers using purely electronic tools such as abletron live have no problem asserting copyright already.

The musican has to cut a CD or something phyiscal.

https://www.tunecore.com/guides/copyrights-101 the first paragraph is:

> For a work to be “copyrightable,” it must be original and fixed in tangible form, such as a sound recording recorded (affixed to) on a CD or a literary work printed (affixed to) on paper.

is a hard drive not a tangible form? Come to think of it, so is a brain, and everything else capable of storing information. That language is atrocious.

It’s about “permanence”, not being able to copyright a live performance that wasn’t recorded for example. It just means you need to be able to distribute / replay the recording, and that means using one of the current common audio technologies.

It made a lot more sense when it was originally written.

Saying 'I don't actually have that melody written down anywhere, but I easily could have, if I'd run this program' feels a bit like saying 'I don't have that melody written down anywhere, but I easily could have if I'd just thought of it first'.

You may say that in fact having the code that generates the data is effectively the same as having the data. This may convince reasonable, rational people, but the fact that we're dealing with the law that we are should tell you that we're not dealing with reasonable, rational people.

Its just the practicals of copyright law. You don’t copyright the idea of a song, a plan for a song, or code that generates a song. You register the tablature accompanied by a recording. See https://medium.com/@dawn_ellmore_employment/what-does-tangib...

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