
Copyrighting melodies to avoid accidental infringement [video] - ChrisArchitect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw
======
Animats
Now they need to generate a name for each one, and provide a search engine
where you put in an audio clip and get back the copyrighted, named item. Plus
the ability to play any of those melodies on line, given the name.

Then, each time a new piece of music appears from a major label, they do the
lookup and generate a DMCA takedown request.

~~~
heartbeats
Names should be easy to choose by diceware. Then you could just have a JS tool
to convert strings like A-B-C-G#-A-B-C#-G to and from diceware names. And a
HTTP endpoint that synthesizes the music as a gzipped .wav file on demand.

~~~
kragen
I fed four popular song names from 2019 to GPT-2, and it suggested some other
song titles in the same genre. A few of them already exist:

B2B, by X Ambassadors (feat. MØ, Alex Clare, Lido, FUSE) .

Saturday Night, by Dot Genesis.

Saturday Night, by Above & Beyond.

Thanks for the Wrecking Ball, by Black Moon.

Best Regards, by Florence + The Machine.

"Fuck You All," by RBE.

Birthday Love, by Notoriously Morbid.

Welcome to the jungle, by Rogue (feat. Mosca).

Nobody and Nobody, by

Stunna (feat. Q-Tip).

Feels Like Summer, by Public Enemy (feat. Public Enemy).

Critical, by Mobb Deep (feat. X-Clan).

Electric, by Josh Wink.

Down, by Aaliyah.

Hip Hop 4 Life, by Quad City DJ's.

Post-9/11, by The Notorious B.I.G.

The Oneness, by 99 Problems (feat. AK-47).

Where Are Ü Now, by Too

All These Things That I've Done, by The 1975.

Triple Poison, by Weezer (feat. Weezer/Beck).

Lionheart, by Usher.

In time, we've come so far

I feel like this approach ought to work well for generating names. Also,
lyrics:

Pull me up like you be makin' an '80s comeback

The devil, he stole your soul and he's back like it ain't no fuckin' thing

I'ma turn you on my side with another trend, boom

Heard they wanted to make a video and they could only get me

When they heard I could do and write and everything was under control

Hey, you could say, just listen to this hit I made

Twist the straw, pull the switch and wrap this napkin around it

All I hear is "ice-nine"

It takes a 'dub to make this work, your stage is a den of thieves

Big Ugly gave me a coupon for a high-paying job

\---

I'm not having any luck getting it to write rhyming lyrics yet, but maybe
[http://wry.me/sonnetron/](http://wry.me/sonnetron/) would be enough — less
evocative, perhaps, but in flawless iambic pentameter with a standard rhyming
scheme.

~~~
heartbeats
Sort of relevant: [https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2#random-
samples](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2#random-samples)

------
gmiller123456
Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically generated music
isn't copyrightable. A copyright can only cover "significantly creative"
works. One example is David Slater's "Monkey Selfie", the fact that the photo
merely exists doesn't make it copyrightable, it matters how it was created.
Had he taken the photo himself, it would be copyrightable. In this specific
case, it was a computer that created the music, not a human.

~~~
bdowling
Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the arrangement
of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., _Feist v. Rural_ , U.S.
1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that listed
names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

[1]
[http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usr...](http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usrep499340.pdf)

Regarding David Slater's "Monkey Selfies", as far as I can tell, no court
decided the question of whether the photo was copyrightable or whether the
copyright belonged to Slater, only that it could not belong to the monkey.

~~~
SilasX
>Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the
arrangement of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., Feist v. Rural,
U.S. 1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that
listed names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable).

Was there a reason you mentioned this? I don't see the relevance to the
surrounding discussion.

~~~
bdowling
A listing of all the possible melodies of a certain length is a list of facts.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

~~~
SilasX
In don’t think anyone mentioned a listing of all possible melodies either, and
if you think something they did mention is functionally equivalent, it would
help if you made that explicit.

Algorithmically generated music is not such a list, and does not involve
publishing such a list, as no one would want that. They typically involve a
lot of selection and choices by the author. They’re only algorithm-generated
on the sense that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was “brush-generated”.

~~~
bdowling
My comment was in the context of OP's video. The Youtube description of that
video states, "I sat down to talk with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their
project to copyright _every possible melody_." (emphasis added)

The video shows that the authors wrote a program to enumerate every possible
melody up to a certain size, possibly narrowed by some criteria. A list like
that should be as entitled to copyright protection as a list of the first
million prime numbers.

Where an algorithm is used as a tool for creativity, I agree that the
resulting work should be copyrightable because an algorithm can be like a
brush in the hands of an artist. Here, however, that is not the case because
the algorithm used simply lists all melodic possibilities and there is no
creative input whatsoever.

~~~
SilasX
>My comment was in the context of OP's video. The Youtube description of that
video states, "I sat down to talk with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their
project to copyright every possible melody." (emphasis added)

Your comment was replying to this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22301633)

which makes no mention of any of those points, so I’m not sure I understand
why you thought that was the right place to put your comment, or why the
connection would have been clear. I think that would have been better as a top
level reply, with the relevant part quoted, as you’ve done here.

~~~
gmiller123456
FWIW, since it was my comment he was replying to, I understood the relevance
and connection just fine. He was supplying additional reasons as to why it was
not copyrightable.

~~~
SilasX
Good to hear! Not having that context, it just looked like the all-too-common
"I'm going to show off my knowledge of the topic despite its dubious
relevance".

And yes, I know, "you should watch the video/read the article before
commenting and then you'd know the context", but usually it's much easier on
everyone for the commenter to just take three seconds to indicate what they're
addressing, rather than expect everyone else to blow the ten minutes of their
life just for a chance to guess at it.

(For that matter, the title would have been better as "Copyrighting every
possible melody...".)

In any case, it was especially confusing since it seemingly had nothing to do
with your comment, about algorithmically generated music, which generally
refers to something else besides publishing an entire domain (rather than the
composer-selected best elements).

------
kruasan
That hard drive is basically just a reduced music version of The Library of
Babel:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel)

~~~
Dylan16807
Sort of, but by making it a physical object it's proving that it's not just
some intuition-breaking edge case caused by infinite numbers, it's in the
realm of normal small human-scale numbers and maybe we need to rethink things
when it's trivial to collide by accident.

------
cosmojg
Here's how you can get it:
[http://allthemusic.info/](http://allthemusic.info/)

Here's how they did it: [https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-
cli](https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli)

~~~
psychometry
Neither of these pages explain how the project works and why a musician would
want to use one of the melodies.

~~~
tasty_freeze
This isn't a work of utility, at least not for musicians. It is a probe of the
legal concepts surrounding copyright law of music. Everyone agrees it is not
right to copy another song note for note for the whole song, or to just make
"small" changes to it. On the other end, everyone agrees that one can't copy a
single note, or a pair of notes.

So considering a court case where party A wins a claim against party B for
having the same sequence of four descending notes in roughly similar rhythms,
is that really sufficient? These lawyers are essentially creating a thought
experiment to help highlight flaws with the existing wording of court rulings
concerning music.

~~~
bitwize
> On the other end, everyone agrees that one can't copy a single note, or a
> pair of notes.

The threshold for copyrightability appears to be zero notes. Mike Batt was
sued by the estate of John Cage over his zero-note composition; the claim was
that it infringed on Cage's copyright to his composition 4'33", which consists
of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Batt ultimately paid six
figures' worth of damages in an out-of-court settlement.

Silence is copyrightable.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
No, it isn't. _Culture_ is copyrightable.

The fallacy in all of these arguments is the inability to distinguish between
the defining properties of a specific cultural object, and the cultural field
- the set of relationships - it's embedded in.

Batt wasn't sued for a minute of silence, but for using the minute of silence
as a cultural signifier. And the Cage estate doesn't own the copyright on
silence - it owns the copyright on silence framed within certain applications
in certain cultural contexts.

Amateurs and consumers tend to think of cultural artefacts as self-contained
objects. So when you sample something you are making a copy of an object -
exactly like copying a data structure.

It's just data, isn't it?

No, it isn't. That is 100% not how it works. You're actually sampling a
reference to a location inside a global data structure called "culture". The
sound is a pointer to that reference, and the reference has a financial value
which is related to its cultural notability and influence.

There's more - much more - to it than that, but that's the level at which this
issue really operates.

~~~
danShumway
> Culture is copyrightable.

From a purely moral perspective this argument just makes the entire situation
even worse. Individuals should not be able to own culture. Culture is
collective, and culture ought to have the freedom to build on top of itself.

I have never had anyone explain copyright to me in a way that made internally
consistent sense, and I have come to believe that the reason for that is
because it _doesn 't_ make internally consistent sense. People either give
explanations that don't stand up to mechanical scrutiny, or they give
explanations that don't stand up to moral scrutiny. Usually both.

Copyright does make sense from the perspective of, "we want to incentivize a
behavior, so we have arbitrarily decided to artificially monopolize certain
things to incentivize it." When you try to break copyright down into something
more inherent or natural, the structure falls apart because (I'm convinced)
there's nothing there to examine. It's just an incentive structure, and that's
the only level we should be discussing it on. It's absurd to claim that any
individual has an inherent, moral property right over culture; their only
moral right to culture is to participate within it -- ironically, the very
right that copyright restricts!

Hacks like music databases don't get around copyright by exploiting its inner
mechanisms. The point isn't to out-argue judges, it's to showcase that
copyright isn't an internally consistent, naturally occurring right.

> And the Cage estate doesn't own the copyright on silence - it owns the
> copyright on silence framed within certain applications in certain cultural
> contexts.

Which is similarly bonkers, just with more words added. The Cage estate
doesn't own anything: we have temporarily granted them an unnatural monopoly
over a certain kind of cultural expression in the hopes that it will somehow
posthumously encourage John Cage to write more.

------
snisarenko
As other commenters have pointed out, this is gimmicky, shallow and
clickbaity. All that they did was count from 1 to 68 billion.

Any piece of digital data can be converted to a number, and if we apply their
argument then you can be "creative" by just counting numbers.

But we all know that's not true. Once the search space becomes that big, you
can't actually "enjoy" any of these melodies. Because you can't listen to all
of them in your lifetime, the ones that you WILL hear are going to be awful
99.999 percent of the time.

Hence, the "creative" process is navigating this search space, and figuring
out which melodies are catchy. Better yet, trying to figure out how or why our
brain decides to like or not like a melody.

~~~
avianlyric
But is this the entire thrust of their argument? That melodies constitute to
smaller component of song to be copyrightable.

Them “copyrighting” every possible melody using a purely numerical method is
just a way of showing how absurd some copyrights are. They’re abusing the
mechanics of the copyright system to demonstrate its flaws.

~~~
snisarenko
Sure. I've glossed over the fact that this is a legal stunt. But you can read
my comment from the perspective of a devil's advocate arguing against them in
court.

Their argument in front of a court boils down to - "counting from 1 to 68
billion is creative effort worthy of copyright". My counter argument is that
its not. And that its obviously so.

I am not saying copyright law is great in it's current state. I am sure the
LETTER OF THE LAW is ambiguous and ever changing for the worse (see Disney).
And I am sure THE INTERPRETATION OF THE LAW has been arbitrary in a lot of
court cases.

BUT, if you believe in THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW - that a person can reap
financial benefits for a certain period of time if they have produced
something "uniquely creative".

Then you should agree that this legal stunt doesn't contribute much of
anything to the legal debate.

------
SailingSperm
Reminds me of this - The Library of Babel.
[https://libraryofbabel.info/](https://libraryofbabel.info/)

Pages and pages of permutations of characters that contains every lyric that's
existed, every novel, every poem, every word you've said to your mother in
correct order.. (amoungst a whole bunch of gibberish)

All this exists here with a url that you can share to re display to book and
page to anyone else.

------
zamalek
The video talks about "are two songs necessarily the same melody" for subtle
differences. Thanks the complete joke that was the Dark Horse lawsuit, there's
a pretty good chance that: the Dark Horse precedent will have to be
overturned, or music copyright (in this form) will end.

This is brilliant.

------
shannifin
Yes, it's not "creative" so shouldn't be protected by copyright, but still
points at a legal problem; we're entering a time in which AI can generate
human-level music with as much or as little user input as the user wants, so
how can we determine who owns the copyrights if we don't know how much
"creativity" was actually involved? (And AI music generation is far easier
than AI writing fiction or drawing, though AI is certainly going to come for
those too.)

Perhaps there will be only two ways to handle it: 1) Case by case when people
file lawsuits or 2) no more copyrightable music? No idea, but we're going to
have to figure it out soon...

------
default-kramer
They mentioned the Marvin Gaye vs Robin Thicke case disparagingly. (I also
think it was a terrible outcome.) But their project seems to support the idea
that there is no objective measure of how similar two songs are. It follows
that we should 1) eliminate music copyright altogether or 2) accept that human
jurors will make decisions we disagree with. They might have been going for
#1, but that is obviously way too idealistic to gain traction (in the USA at
least).

I think that there can be a partially objective measure of song similarity,
and that melody is an important component.

------
kevin_thibedeau
Copyright requires a creative act. Mechanically enumerating all combinations
isn't creative.

~~~
downerending
Legally, that's probably correct. And yet, it points out the absurdity of
allowing melodies to be copyrighted in the first place. There just aren't that
many of them, especially when one limits to the musically plausible set.

~~~
bdowling
The opposing argument would be that there are millions (billions?) of possible
melodies, so selecting ones that are particularly pleasing is a significant
creative act.

~~~
Dylan16807
Picking out of millions/billions is way too little input to be a creative act.
That would let you get a meaningful copyright on a sequence of _two words_.

------
cosmojg
Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin are heroes!

I can’t wait until the day comes when we as a species no longer feel the need
to claim intellectual property. This shit is so stupid.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
"Information wants to be free!"

"Please stop giving my personal information to everyone!"

~~~
Dylan16807
Privacy and copyright are completely separate issues.

~~~
dane-pgp
The obvious dividing line is, the copyright holder wants their data (creative
work) to be spread as widely as possible (to paying customers), whereas
someone with a secret potentially wants no one in the world to receive that
data.

I don't think anyone is claiming that composers should be forced to publish
their songs against their will.

