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
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".
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.
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
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.
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.
> 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...
i.e. sans lyrics
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.