

Copyright and the World's Most Popular Song - yannis
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1111624_code329492.pdf?abstractid=1111624&mirid=3

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LucaDuval
I remember reading a sci-fi novel that impressed me as a child about the wife
of a recently deceased composer corrupting a politician to not vote for a
proposal to extend the copyright on the basis that there are only a limitited
number of possible "interesting" combinations of notes. Hence an unlimited
copyright is like a death sentence to the creativity of all future musicians.
I believe that the actual limit of 50 years is already too much.

~~~
htsh
I remember this too -- saw it on reddit, had a title that had something to do
with elephant's memory or something to that. Anyone know exactly what this
was?

Edit: found it! melancholy elephants:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholy_Elephants>

~~~
LucaDuval
Thank you, I couldn't remember the title.

Here it is if anybody want to read it:

<http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm>

It is strange the way in which a random quote stays in our mind for years, I
still remembered the following almost verbatim.

"Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they
create.

In fact they do nothing of the sort.

They discover.

Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical
tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system.

For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and
telling ourselves that we `created' them.

To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite
possibility.

As a species I think we will react poorly to having our noses rubbed in the
fact that we are discoverers and not creators."

~~~
yannis
This is very similar to the philosophical implications that all mathematics
are out there and we are just discovering them. In this light one can always
use the example of the infinite monkeys typing random characters and producing
all the works of Shakespeare. If you do the Maths though you will need more
time than the predicted life-span of our Universe.

Thanks for the link though very interesting.

------
goodness
"...was the product of intense creative labor"

I don't mean to downplay the amount of work that goes in to writing a song,
but this seems a bit over the top. Short little melodies like this are trivial
to write. My pre-school age children come up with these all the time.

The tune of Happy Birthday doesn't seem particularly catchy to me. We've just
heard it repeated so many times.

~~~
anamax
> I don't mean to downplay the amount of work that goes in to writing a song,
> but this seems a bit over the top. Short little melodies like this are
> trivial to write. My pre-school age children come up with these all the
> time.

> The tune of Happy Birthday doesn't seem particularly catchy to me. We've
> just heard it repeated so many times.

Read the story. The authors actually did a lot of work on Happy Birthday.
(They had a couple of conflicting goals and did a lot of testing.)

While short little melodies are trivial to write, HB isn't just any short
little melody. Disagree? Come up with a few that work as well. Riches await.

~~~
goodness
I read the story. It claims to be "a product of a highly focused, laborious
effort to write a song that was extremely simple to sing yet musically
interesting and emotionally expressive, undertaken by a composer and an
educator who happened to be sisters."

I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort." And I don't think the
song is popular because of some fantastic musical merits. If the song was
still "good morning to all" then it would be just another song. The only
reason it has any monetary value is because it became associated with
birthdays.

~~~
anamax
> I still don't really buy that it was "laborious effort."

Having read accounts of said effort, I wonder what you think qualifies as
laborious. They did days of testing with groups of kids.

> And I don't think the song is popular because of some fantastic musical
> merits.

And no one said that it has fantastic musical merits. Instead, they say that
it has fantastic kid music merits.

That's a hard market to crack. Lots of people try to write Barney, but few
actually pull it off.

There are lots of songs that could have become the standard. That one did, by
design and labor.

------
Mark_B
As an aside, just in case anybody is interested (as I was), here's the scoop
on the Happy Bday copyright from Snopes:
<http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp>

