Every Melody Has Been Copyrighted (and they're all on this hard drive)
Why Hacker News recommends it
It is the go-to explainer whenever HN discusses brute-forcing melodies, copyright, or AI-generated content, since it features the project's creators.
What it is
Adam Neely interviews Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to generate and copyright every possible melody as MIDI. The video explains their reasoning and how it bears on music copyright lawsuits.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2020 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec willvarfar · 2020-02 · on “Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits”
At the very beginning of this excellent interview [this video] that I found in the comments here, they explain this. Apparently, for this to work, they have to "affix them to a physical medium". Strongly recommend watching that video! Excellent info.
Recommends dredmorbius · 2020-02 · on “Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits”
Those are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response). Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes, the rights of the author to sue for any claims including moral claims of authorship . See: [LINK] So: clever stunt, but legally impotent, both by law and the self-neutering actions of the actors here. Adam Neely's video (interviewing Rhiel and collaborator Noah Rubin) covers many
Recommends varispeed · 2021-04 · on “The Endless Acid Banger: algorithmic self-composing acid techno music”
If someone automates music creation in the popular styles and then automates submitting it for copyright protection, then in not so distant future creation of any music will be illegal, as every nice sounding melody will be claimed. In a way this is what large labels do. They release a ton of similar sounding music just for that reason. I think the patent trolling equivalent in music world has not been discussed much. Check this video from Adam Neely: [this video]
Recommends nonstickcoating · 2022-05 · on “How many melodies are there? (2014)”
This[0] is a video by Adam Neely, who frequently talks about the cluster f*ck that is copyright law with regards to music, interviewing two guys having done this (within some constraints). This[1] is the website linking to the dataset and code that was used to generate it. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]
Cites lillesvin · 2020-02 · on “Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits”
Adam Neely (professional musician and YouTuber mostly about music theory) did a video about this with the guys behind it: [this video]
Cites Dracophoenix · 2022-06 · on “Papers on GitHub Copilot, copyright law, and ownership for AI-generated code”
> I think what is really going to be interesting in when someone finally does this trick for music Already done, although I don't think an actual lawsuit has been filed. [this video]
Cites an_ko · 2022-12 · on “What Does Copyright Say about Generative Models?”
Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin have all the melodies on a hard drive. (More info in this Adam Neely video: [this video] and the TED talk linked in a nearby comment.) So depending on a court's kinda arbitrary definition of creativity on any given day, all of them may or may not be copyrighted already. An infringement being accidental also doesn't seem to stop copyright holders from successfully suing people. I think this means you could technically be successfully sued for dropping some bricks on a piano, since no matter where they land, the action constitutes a public performance of a copyrighted work. Fun stuff.