Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement | Damien Riehl | TEDxMinneapolis
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as the stunt behind 'copyright every melody' in threads about music copyright, takedowns and AI authorship.
What it is
Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Recommends adamredwoods · 2023-05 · on “Ed Sheeran Demonstrates How Copyright Is Destroying Musicians”
They did a great Tedx talk here, and the person effectively describes the problems that Sheeran has run into: [this video]
Cites simcup · 2020-10 · on “YouTube-dl has received a DMCA takedown from RIAA”
You wouldn't even need ML. Iirc there was this guy who coded a script that played every permutation of 12 notes in a 5 minute period and then made all the Melodys public domain. Ianal so I don't know if this would hold up in court, but technically that should invalidate every copyright on Melodys after that point in time. E: [this video] found the ted talk
Cites NiceWayToDoIT · 2020-11 · on “Show HN: A 1000 auto-generated hexagonal SVG logos”
Is this beginning of a Copyright trolling campaign or preventing accidental infringement as similar case in music [this video] ?
Cites NiceWayToDoIT · 2021-05 · on “Piano teacher gets copyright claim for Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata [video]”
That is the reason these guys decided to Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement [this video] TED talk
Cites conradev · 2022-03 · on “US Copyright Office refuses application with AI algorithm named as author”
There is also the brute force approach (from 2020) to generate every possible melody and release it under the Creative Commons: [this video]
Cites jasrys · 2023-09 · on “U.S. Copyright Office RFC: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright”
1. lots of established law and case law (at least in the US), this is already a well-settled problem and folks have the tools and proper venue to bring infringement claims. Yes, federal copyright infringement litigation is prohibitively expensive for many issues. There is a now a "small claims court" for smaller issues. [1] 2. Those works cannot be copyrighted (at least in the US). [2]. And hey, someone already tried copyrighting every song melody [3] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [this video]
Cites rainbowzootsuit · 2023-10 · on “California’s Math Misadventure Is About to Go National”
I hope this has been tested by now, but not sure: Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement | Damien Riehl | TEDxMinneapolis [this video]
Cites alwa · 2026-06 · on “AI Is Designing Radio Chips That Humans Couldn't Even Imagine”
I’m reminded of lawyer Damien Riehl’s (performative) reaction to the Sam Smith infringement decision, back in 2019/2020. He and programmer Noah Rubin algorithmically generated every possible melody (within a certain combinatorial space, in MIDI format as I recall), and purported to release them under CC-0 license [0]. He went on to attract some attention and explain his argument at a regional TEDx event [1]. I seem to recall legal commentators reacting with an eyeroll—apparently judges split much finer hairs than these for a living—but it was a cute stunt. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video] and [LINK]