Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

If you create a program which provably generates all of the members of a specified set, do you own the copyright to a member of this set regardless of the runtime of your program?

jmkd2• 6 years ago

I've often thought how strikingly easy it seems to be to produce sentences that have probably never been written before.

For example:

I am typing these words on a mobile phone whilst sat on a train to an airport, wearing a green jacket, brown shoes and a maroon hat with a black bag containing gifts for my children. That seems a fairly prosaic sentence at first glance but I doubt has been written before.

rzzzt• 6 years ago

Try searching for it in the Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/

(edit: ninja'd)

samplatt• 6 years ago

There's a subreddit for that: https://www.reddit.com/r/BrandNewSentence/

iainmerrick• 6 years ago

I’m sure I’ve read (in the context of Google searches) that it’s very easy to write a sentence that’s never been written. Most sentences on HN are probably completely unique.

saalaa• 6 years ago

Of course, it's already been done: https://libraryofbabel.info/

jrockway• 6 years ago

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."

drno1232• 6 years ago

Now is the time to train convolutional NN to find "catchy" melodies, and then unleash it over this dataset, and become famous songwriter.

throwqwerty4• 6 years ago

You wouldn't use a CNN for this because there's no spatial correlation to take advantage of. Maybe an RNN somehow but the basic problem is scoring (ie how melodic a song is) not classification so honestly I don't know you'd do this using neural networks.

nicklo• 6 years ago

On the contrary, with a more generous reading of the previous comment, it holds some merit.

1. CNN's are used fairly commonly for sequence tasks nowadays. Convolutions can be 1D after all. 2. It's also possible the previous comment was referring to using 2D convolutions on the spectrogram of the audio, which is a common approach. 3. Neural networks are capable of more than classification. Scoring is a regression task which is common application of neural networks.

patio11• 6 years ago

But this will of course not work, because enumerating the bitspace does not produce bits of the right colour: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Double_a_922• 6 years ago

A tl;dr would be nice it you post such a long article that doesn't directly seem to have anything to do with the current topic.

Leszek2• 6 years ago

It's actually very relevant, the TL;DR (from memory) is that lawyers (and judges) aren't programmers, and the source of data (referred to as the "colour of the bits") is as important as the actual bits of the data. Thus "I have this bit pattern as part of a bit enumeration" is different, to the legal system, than "I have this bit pattern because I specifically created it".

TeMPOraL10• 6 years ago

It's one of the more insightful things on the Internet; well worth the time to read in full. Still, a TL;DR as requested:

"Colour" is a term that encompasses provenance, chains of cause-effect, intent and related concepts. Bits are obviously colorless from compsci point of view, but are colorful from the legal POV. For instance, bits encoding a copyrighted video are just numbers, but for the judge it'll matter whether I got them from a lucky PRNG run or from a torrent site.

Not understanding that colour is real in legal systems is the core source of confusion people have wrt. intellectual property and illegal information (e.g. child porn).

therealx• 6 years ago

RIP Terry Davis - saw his name on a comment and did a double take.

slavik81• 6 years ago

I went looking for an obituary, and discovered that his Wikipedia page is quite well-written [1].

Long ago, I enabled showdead to read Terry's comments. They didn't always make sense, but occasionally there'd be one that was worth it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

sullyj32• 6 years ago

What he's calling colour is just provenence, which is a perfectly sensible concept. You can even take the position that provenance is a physical reality, if you take 4 dimensional spacetime seriously.

http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime

shoo• 6 years ago

It's interesting to think about this from a more general perspective: what if we're not limited to midi, and we're talking about a more general kind of _design_ problem, where the design problem is to select a good solution to a problem within some (large) but finite and theoretically enumerable search space.

We can think of selecting a good melody to fit into a song as one example of a design problem -- searching through some finite enumerable space of melodies and selecting a melody that's a good fit. A lot of the effort in this process is testing and evaluating the melody to see if it is any good to listen to / any good in context. This effort hasn't been done if you simply brute force enumerate and list the search space without testing anything.

There are many kinds of design problems where the effort of checking if a proposed solution is any good vastly outweighs the effort of suggesting a solution.

We could do the same thing for other kinds of design problems.

In principle, what if we enumerate some (vast) finite space of digital circuits -- if we put a few limits on the amount of stuff we can put into a single circuit, and discretise any continuous parameters to produce a finite space. Does that mean we can copyright all these possible circuits, even if we put no effort into seeing if any of them are fit for any purpose?

Can we enumerate some large finite space of possible arrangements of atoms into molecules and then copyright them all, without putting any effort into analysis or experimental testing to see if any of the proposed molecules are fit for any purpose?

Snisarenko made a similar criticism when this was posted 15 days ago:

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.

-- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306857

From my perspective of framing this situation: this is dumb, as no design of any melodies has been performed. The design is the uniform prior distribution over some space of all possible melodies, most of which will be uninteresting / not fit for any particular purpose, which is a pretty uninspiring notion of design.

pishpash4• 6 years ago

If intellectual property of this kind is a finite resource, then maybe there should be a lifetime intellectual property "takings" limit.

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

Can we enumerate some large finite space of possible arrangements of atoms into molecules and then copyright them all, without putting any effort into analysis or experimental testing to see if any of the proposed molecules are fit for any purpose?

Pharma corps do this (with patents), ostensibly, but IP rights have a reasonable cost to them so they pre-filter.

lillesvin• 6 years ago

Adam Neely (professional musician and YouTuber mostly about music theory) did a video about this with the guys behind it: https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw

Lewton3• 6 years ago

This really needs to be at the top, as it answers a lot of the criticisms found here on HN

ehnto5• 6 years ago

It also makes it clear they realise the limitations of the exercise (it isn't nearly all possible melodies), and it shows their motives a bit better too (helping protect against corporate music copyright trolls).

onion2k• 6 years ago

The idea might be to prevent lawsuits, but presumably the authors have opened themselves up to being sued by anyone who already owns a melody. If melody owners can't sue the authors then their work can't protect anyone either.

DiabloD3• 6 years ago

The artist suing, however, would have to worry about legitimizing this work. If the artist suing were to win, it would be setting precedent that everything else is the archive is also copyrightable, including all the melodies that are novel.

A_No_Name_Mouse• 6 years ago

Wouldn't they get into legal issues as they are colliding with every song already in existence?

bonestamp2• 6 years ago

Since they're not trying to profit from them, they'd probably just get cease and desist letters and take the offending ones down. Since one of the founders is a lawyer, it's probably feasible to handle most minor conflicts that come up while still protecting the vast major of the melodies.

IvyMike• 6 years ago

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

nullc2• 6 years ago

https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar/page/n15/...

albertzeyer4• 6 years ago

The code is written in Rust. The core algorithm can be found here: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli/blob/master/src/ut... (Specifically the function gen_sequences. It basically uses multi_cartesian_product to iterate over all permutations.)

Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org (https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets)? I mean, as we see, it's trivial to create them. The code above is kind of a self-extracting archive, so it's just the same thing but in compressed form. And I guess it should not matter (legally) whether you store it compressed or uncompressed (or less compressed).

hobofan• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if it would hold up legally anyway, but with it already being generated I can see it working out a bit better.

If you only provide the code as a means of generating any melody, you could just as well replace it with any music instrument and claim you can generate any melody with it.

arketyp• 6 years ago

Ad absurdum (or maybe not so much?), any universal Turing machine can be programmed to list every possible program, specifically the one generating every melody. So the copyright claim could then just as well point to Conway's game of life or rule 110.

willvarfar3• 6 years ago

At the very beginning of this excellent interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw 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.

albertzeyer4• 6 years ago

Hm, they don't really explain this, or do they? They just say "by saving those melodies to a hard drive they have affixed them to a physical medium which is all that is necessary to copyright them".

So, by the same argument, they could copy the self-extracting archive to a hard drive, and then have the same thing, or not?

They even say that they already store it in a compressed form on the hard drive.

What if some future compressor (future ZIP format) is clever enough to see that you are going to save all possible permutations of something, and then saves this is a much better compressed way. Then suddenly when compressors do this, it means when you use such a compressor, you do not have copyright on the data anymore?

vbezhenar2• 6 years ago

You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything including god. So you can claim copyright for everything.

zdragnar• 6 years ago

One could make the same argument for a mathematician with a typewriter. The fact that it could come up with a particular sequence is, I think, less important than whether or not ot actually has recorded a particular sequence.

phonebucket• 6 years ago

You can trivially write a program which will enumerate all the possible byte sequences in the universe. So you can claim that this tiny program contains everything...

Not to get too far off topic, but even an infinitely long byte sequence cannot represent all numbers. It's possible to construct something not representable by that sequence via Cantor's diagonal argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument

emiliobumachar• 6 years ago

Claiming copyright of everything won't save you from producing all that child pornography and hate speech, not to mention unauthorized copies of state secrets. ;)

nkrisc3• 6 years ago

That's all great until the judge asks for a demonstration to show it can generate the material you're presumably suing over.

jagged-chisel• 6 years ago

No, because each thing you want to claim copyright on must be “fixed in physical form.”

collyw• 6 years ago

Isn't it a bit of wasted space to store the generated data on archive.org

Could the algorithm be considered a form of compression?

code6fun• 6 years ago

Does the algorithm represent the Kolmogorov Complexity of the dataset?

pbhjpbhj2• 6 years ago

Yes, mathematically. But copyright requires copying, strictly speaking, so you need a copy from which to have copied.

An algorithm that generates all possible English sentences doesn't demonstrate that I copied this sentence from it, and the balance of probabilities (used in tort cases) suggests that I came up with the sentence, run-on as it is, rather than performing that algo and then selecting that sentence. Moreover 17USC (102? sorry I don't recall) says that media needs to be "fixed" to acquire copyright; so me having to perform the algo makes it no impediment to my owning copyright of a sentence that, if performed, the algo would by expected produce (which is sensible really, perhaps the algo is errant and can't make this sentence, maybe it only forms grammatical sentences ...

eb0la• 6 years ago

I guess you need it stored somewhere to claim it existed on a given date...

If someone is using archive.org for this purpose, please consider donating :-)

nck4222• 6 years ago

By that logic, the library of Babel owns the copyright on every piece of literature that could be written, which would be a terrible idea.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

virgilp2• 6 years ago

They don't pre-generate all the "books", right? So they can't claim the copyright (it's not "affixed to a physical medium")

paulddraper19• 6 years ago

Nice link; thanks!

anonsivalley6522• 6 years ago

Yep. They could've used that space for rainbowtables. I'm old enough to remember when someone from shm00 had rainbowtables available for download, but I guess the network bills added up or the feds threatened them.

Robin_Message• 6 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but as I understand copyright law there seem to be to be two problems with this:

- a copyrightable work must include some human creativity. It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative.

- Copyright depends on copying. If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song, then you infringed its copyright, regardless of if there is an licensable version of that melody that you could have copied. What matters is which one you copied, not the existence of alternate copies.

tzmudzin• 6 years ago

What matters is which one you copied, not the existence of alternate copies.

Not a lawyer either, but "I came up with this myself" is the standard defense of the artists, with mixed success.

Iv• 6 years ago

To be fair, this program is a stupid response to a stupid problem. Even if that muddied the waters for a year or two, that would just be a patch, not a fix.

The fix is political. Call for copyright reforms.

Lewton3• 6 years ago

Copyright depends on copying

Copyright claims have been won by arguing the song was so widely available that it’s unreasonable to assume the defendant did not have access to it, which is why they’re trying to spread access to this as far as possible

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22340325

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 points of copyright, though not the originality, authorship, or PD angles. (Posted elsewhere in thread, echoing here.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=sfXn_ecH5Rw

pergadad• 6 years ago

I think the aim is not to claim that other pieces violate this collection's copyright, but rather to invalidate the frivolous claims that such melody sequences are copyrighted to begin with.

Either the courts decide they are not, in which case the creators will be happy.

Or they are copyrightable and therefore this collection, even if it is in the public domain, is a prior art that invalidates any claim that a newly used melody is really new/copyrightable.

sandov4• 6 years ago

It seems to me that an enumeration of possibilities might be creative, but there is no way an individual element of that enumeration can be considered creative.

What if the author was thinking about generating a specific, original melody when he hit "run"? He just wanted that melody and didn't care about the rest, but he was lazy and it was easier to find his melody among the rest of generated melodies instead of modifying the source code.

Can you deny that he created that melody?

hannasanarion4• 6 years ago

Copyright depends on copying

This is a response to the Flame v Katy Perry lawsuit, where a youtube video with 100,000 views was deemed sufficient popularity for the court to assume copying without proof.

The element that Katy Perry was found to have illegally copied is a 4-note descending line with equal spacing between the notes. In both "Joyful Noise" and "Dark Horse" the pattern was probably generated by a producer pressing the "arp" button on a minor chord in a DAW. Neither of them actually plotted out each of the notes with particular purpose. But the Court still said that the 4-note descending pattern is original and creative enough, the fact that it was composed by software notwithstanding, and illegal to reproduce.

libria• 6 years ago

Tangentially relevant is Adam Neely's take on that lawsuit: https://youtu.be/0ytoUuO-qvg.

TeMPOraL10• 6 years ago

I agree, with the small caveat:

If you release a song with a catchy melody stolen from another song...

Copied. Not stolen. Copied.

Of course I know what you meant, but it's sad that this phrasing has entered the language. In all the tensions around limits of IP protection, this one was probably the most effective trick media companies pulled. Equating copyright violation with theft (and, through implication, their moral weights), even though one has nothing to do with the other.

tunesmith2• 6 years ago

It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc.

Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.

Intermernet• 6 years ago

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument.

The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years. The current state of music copyright law is an absolute joke, and deserves to be "disrupted" (destroyed).

goto114• 6 years ago

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws?

You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

paulddraper19• 6 years ago

copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale

Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet!

The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.

bougiefever• 6 years ago

For example, there are a number of songs that include a rendition of Tom's Diner within a larger melody. Also popular to add to a song is the Arabian riff melody (which is so old it's not copyrightable, but you get my point) I don't know of any law suits around Tom's Diner song, but this is an example of the types of ridiculous lawsuits out there over copyright.

albertzeyer4• 6 years ago

The code actually can produce every possible melody in MIDI. They simply have not stored every possible melody explicitly (uncompressed) on a hard drive (which is impossible, as the size is infinity).

However, if you interpret the program itself as a self-extracting compressed archive, they actually have stored every possible melody (in a compressed way).

So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here (is ZIP allowed? is TAR allowed? what about more sophisticated like PAQ? and what about this Rust code?). This is what I/we discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441328

TeMPOraL10• 6 years ago

So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here

It doesn't matter at all. As 'patio11 correctly points elsewhere in the thread[0], this question boils down to the colour of the bits.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441118

arghwhat• 6 years ago

More correctly, it can produce every possible monophonic sequence of tones given infinite time, which in the article was further limited to monophonic 12-tone sequences across a single octave (any other limitations I missed?).

A melody contains more than a sequence of tones. The most heartless definition would at the very least include rhythm. For every sequence of tones they output, they only produce one out of hundreds of possible melodies for that sequence.

It is of course an interesting thought to consider the definition of decompression, but on the other hand, we should also limit the contributed idiocy to the bare minimum required to break the relevant idiotic rules.

paulddraper19• 6 years ago

Gotta love programmers.

So the question reduces to how much the type of compression matters here

If you compress, you can copyright the compressed bytes.

If you don't compress, you can copyright the uncompressed bytes.

As far as that copyright extending to derivations, e.g. decompressions, the answer indeed situation-dependent. For example, converting a copyrighted font from TTF to WOFF does not remove the copyright. But converting a copyrighted font from TTF to screen pixels to WOFF removes the copyright. (Sorry I don't have a reference; probably findable.)

The "self-extracting zip" derivation would probably fall into the latter category; that is, the copyright would not transfer.

---

But even if the copyright were maintained during your advanced decompression, one could argue that editing down to very specific portion of that extremely large body of work was a substantive/transformational derivation, which they could then copyright themselves.

Transformative works are very common in art. The most famous example is Duchamp simply adding a mustache to a print of da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and copyrighting that. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.H.O.O.Q.

auiya• 6 years ago

Every possible combination of 8 notes in 12 beats is not infinite. Assuming all quarter notes it's just (8^12)-(8-1)^12 = 54,878,189,535. If you factor in rhythmic variances, the number is much much larger, but still not infinite.

https://plus.maths.org/content/how-many-melodies-are-there

pingyong• 6 years ago

By that logic, a program that simply counts up from 0 (with bignums, as long as the machine has enough memory), is actually a compressed form of every single piece of data or information that has ever, will ever or can ever be created.

IAmGraydon• 6 years ago

Exactly. Harmonic progression is probably the most important part of this, as it imparts context on the melody. The same melody over I-V-IV-vi and vi-V-IV-V is not the same thing.

jdbernard• 6 years ago

It is from the courts' point of view.

hunter2_2• 6 years ago

From what I recall, it's exclusively melody and words which can be copyrighted in terms of songwriting. Harmony isn't copyrightable.

hannasanarion4• 6 years ago

Courts don't care about harmony. Most US courts follow a guideline that the copyrightable parts of a composition are melody and lyrics. Nobody has ever successfully sued for stolen chord progression.

paulgb3• 6 years ago

No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes

I am not a musician, but which of these are copied in the Tom Petty / Sam Smith case that motivated this exercise? To my untrained ear, I do hear some similarities in the relative lengths of the notes (meter?).

I found a side-by-side comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YflFw9T77FQ

rdlw3• 6 years ago

I don't have a great ear, but I think it's a similar melody, albeit at a different tempo and key (?). If you can't hear it, try changing the video speed to 1.5x during the Sam Smith part.

If these two songs are similar enough, then I think it could be argued that a MIDI sequence has been copied, since in both cases it requires a significant change of tempo and key. A lot of commenters seem to be missing this point: yes, the generated sequences sound different from real songs, but so do the songs involved in the ridiculous court cases. Radiohead and Ed Sheeran were sued for chord progressions, Katy Perry for a melody. The songs involved were altered about as much as the MIDI sequences would need to be to show the similarities.

ehnto5• 6 years ago

Music lawsuits can be based on about as much information as they're conveying. I think that's their point, too. I don't believe they were trying to be satirical, they wanted to prove a point about the nature of music itself that could be used in defending musicians against lawsuits.

One of the items they were trying to point out, often abused in lawsuits for pop music, is the idea of "Access". If you came up with an idea all by yourself, but a similar song exists that is popular enough, the court argues that just by there being the possibility that you heard it, you therefore definitely heard it and then copied it.

If this music set exists, and is freely available, shouldn't it be considered that you had reasonable access to it and therefore stole it? No, of course not, that would be a ridiculous assumption and so is the current outlook of a song being popular being enough proof that you stole the idea.

Not to mention, music is extremely formulaic. Chord progressions have a natural tendency to certain forms, with centuries of prior art, rhythm within genres of music is often the same, even melodies have a trend toward particular combinations (leading tones over chord progressions bring about lots of similar sounding solos).

Any musician trying to claim copyright for their music should remember that their song only exists on the back of centuries of musical exploration. Consider how much of the song you can say is truly novel, it's going to be nearly nothing.

The combination of lyrics + chords + melody is in my opinion, the absolute minimum you need to claim a song has been copied. Lyrics are derivative, melodies are derivative, chord progressions are derivative, but together they have the chance to be a unique combination.

SilasX2• 6 years ago

I don't believe they were trying to be satirical, they wanted to prove a point about the nature of music itself that could be used in defending musicians against lawsuits.

Sufficiently advanced “proving a point via absurdity to make a more general argument” is indistinguishable from satire.

yborg• 6 years ago

It's also cleverly disguised PR for the attorney. Well played (so to speak).

irrational3• 6 years ago

I don’t know what any of those words mean (octave, melody, tempo, harmony, diatonic?)

Do you have a book that you would recommend to learn about these terms?

kian2• 6 years ago

Octave - a doubling in the frequency. Generally speaking, in twelve tone equally tempered classical music, melodies and harmonies are drawn from a scale, a subset of these twelve notes. The most notable of those scales, the diatonic scale has 7 unique notes, and the eighth note wraps back around to the beginning of the scale. Thus, moving from a note to a note double the frequency took 8 notes - hence, the octave. Diatonic is both the name of the most used of the 7-note scales mentioned above, and also a term meaning 'within the scale', i.e., 'diatonic to a (given) scale', depending on context.

Melody is the horizontal arrangement of notes for an individual voice or instrument over time. Harmony is the vertical arrangement of notes sounding at the same time, and how those transform horizontally over time as a group. Tempo is the speed in beats per minute of the background 'pulse' of the music.

Now, asking for a music theorist to give you an algorithmic definition of how to make music with any of the above? Good luck ;)

db48x5• 6 years ago

That's not even true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ytoUuO-qvg&feature=youtu.be

amelius• 6 years ago

Isn't any substantial block of random bits already covering this?

tomlong2• 6 years ago

I know it's many orders of magnitude more difficult.. but if I got a printer to print out one of every possible art and published it, CC licensed it, etc wouldn't that have the same legal status as these melodies... probably none?

I showed this article to a musicologist (in the UK) and he said:

I assume that somehow lawyers can refer to a precedent of "this is too ridiculous to be taken seriously"

tomlong2• 6 years ago

Just to quickly add, I think the project is cool, it provokes interesting discussion and it doesn't need to be legally watertight or achieve what they say they set out to, to be worthwhile.

cyphar• 6 years ago

The other thing is that machine-generated works almost by definition do not reach the "creative" aspect of the "original and creative" requirement for copyright to apply.

bdowling3• 6 years ago

Exactly. Their work is not protectable under copyright because it is not a work of authorship, but an exhaustive list of all possible melodies.

nullc2• 6 years ago

Gonna leave this here: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Techies4Trump• 6 years ago

I hereby copyright every combination of ones and zeros of length one to infinity, now you cannot sue me .

grizzles• 6 years ago

I hope someone Copyrights all possible Java method signatures for the Oracle v Google case. You could write a "compression/decompression" tool in the website's javascript for people to check if you own the Copyright or not. There would be many pages of data so you might want to make it work offline with a Service Worker. To prove you are on the up and up.

nmeofthestate• 6 years ago

Definitely the most extremely programmer thing I've seen this week.

makach• 6 years ago

So...they have remade all songs made as well? I predict lawsuits coming...!

golemotron• 6 years ago

It's time to repost _What Colour are your Bits_.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

emilfihlman• 6 years ago

ailideex• 6 years ago

And yet this will prevent exactly 0 lawsuits.

dusted• 6 years ago

I think it's an interesting idea, however, wouldn't this also risk generating already-copyrighted melodies? Putting archive.org at risk of getting massively sued ?

theGreatgame• 6 years ago

I’m just gonna jump in and say how cool this is. I get that it’s not perfect but it’s sort of a middle finger to “the man”.

anonsivalley6522• 6 years ago

This reads like an Onion article. I heard about this on Lawful Masses with Leonard French, a copyright attorney who pwned Prenda Law. Also, the number of potential melodies, considering the degrees of freedom involved, is on the order of the number of games of chess. IANAL but this doesn't seem more than a stunt to call attention to the legal climate.

stiangrindvoll• 6 years ago

So we could create a directory in IPFS with all melodies possible? :)

725686• 6 years ago

This reminds me a lot a short story "The Library of Babel" by argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges in which he conceives "a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

*Edit: book -> short story

mustacheemperor• 6 years ago

There is at least one website that hosts a "real" library of babel (generatively).

https://libraryofbabel.info

varelaz• 6 years ago

I hope that will not hurt them. Imagine that in copyright lawsuite I refered to their midi archive as a source and since that they become in charge for copyright infringement.

nephrite• 6 years ago

It can be argued that since the melodies were generated by an algorithm, they are not a product of creative process and therefore not subject to copyright.

KMnO4• 6 years ago

Now all we need is some “head cheese” [0] to generate the same thing using human neurons

[0] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=687

ShadowErin• 6 years ago

this is kinda getting out of hand

filoeleven• 6 years ago

Reminds me of an aside in Accelerando:

His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream – coincidentally uncompressing it – and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's stereo – but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ...

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

ngneer• 6 years ago

This was on HN several days ago, is it a double post?

classified• 6 years ago

KIFulgore• 6 years ago

Bobby Prince certainly wouldn't get away with the original DooM soundtrack today.

shadowgovt7• 6 years ago

Assuming we accept their premise: how does this prevent lawsuits? Wouldn't the melody-set they've created be subject to a copyright infringement claim from every melody produced before their experiment that is still under copyright?

db48x5• 6 years ago

The method of generation prevents that. They didn't listen to song A and write down the melodies from it, then listen to song B and write down those melodies. They generated them all in order using a computer program.

Presumably it prevents lawsuits because I can write a song starting with a melody from this archive knowing that it's in the public domain. (Or because it makes obvious the absurdity of having a copyright on a 12-note melody in the first place.)

cormacrelf2• 6 years ago

It doesn’t prevent lawsuits, or do anything at all. Other comments here are close; this material is not an original work, so copyright does not subsist in it. No copyright, no ability to place in public domain or issue licenses at all. This is the equivalent of pouring a glass of water in the ocean and then declaring you own all international waters.

parasense• 6 years ago

I'm sure this has already been remarked upon in comments, but.... Not every possible melody!

A significant portion of melodies likely to be generated by people, or put another way these are the more trivial melodies. The range of complexity is vast, so just like cracking passwords might use a dictionary attack, or use English alphabet, or similar limited scopes, so it goes here.....

kabdib3• 6 years ago

Back in the day I worked for Atari, writing game cartridges for their line of home computers. I had a decent relationship with marketing and had developed a reputation as one of the more helpful geeks.

One fine day a marketing guy knocked on my door and asked:

"What would it take to print out every possible eight-by-eight bitmap? We want to copyright them so our competition can't use them."

Seriously.

So I told him the story about the king who wanted to reward the inventor of chess, and upon being asked what he wanted the inventor said "one grain of wheat for the first square, two for the second, four for the third..."

I thought a bit, and added "I think that printout would outweigh the planet."

He went away. I was not a helpful geek that day.

Later I realized that I had only considered black-and-white bitmaps, and that preempting copyright on color bitmaps would have meant a lot more planets.

There's got to be a Douglas Adams style tie-in here somewhere involving aliens with planet-chewer-uppers invading and taking Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and then us for some cockamamie copyright scheme in another galaxy . . .

syntheticnature• 6 years ago

Once, a guy at a bar told me he wanted to do a similar thing: displaying a 100x100 image that changed once a second to run through all possible bitmaps. He didn't believe me when I told him that doing so would exceed the the lifespan of the planet (to say nothing of what state the universe would be in).

tripzilch• 6 years ago

What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :)

[0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.

jniedrauer3• 6 years ago

I tried calculating this number for 16-bit images in Python (8^8^16), and the interpreter just froze. Go was pretty quick though: 3.940200619639448e+115

DeusExMachina• 6 years ago

For scale, there are an estimated 10^80 atoms in the entire universe.

esoterica• 6 years ago

Neither of those numbers are correct. Firstly, exponentiation is right associative so 8^8^16 ≠ (8^8)^16 ≈ 3.94e+115.

Secondly, that number is wrong anyway. The correct number is (2^16)^(8*8).

hansvm• 6 years ago

Python is probably trying to compute it exactly.

ericfrederich• 6 years ago

Not sure where that math came from. 16 bit 8 by 8 pixel image would be 16^(8x8) or in Python...

  print(f"{16 ** (8*8):.4E}")

  1.1579E+77

EDIT: I calculated 16 color, not 16 bit. Disregard

Python wanted to use a float to convert to exponential format but it overflowed. Need to use strings ;-)

  n=(2**16)**(8*8); s=str(n); print(s[0] + '.' + s[1:6] + 'E+' + str(len(s) - 1))

  1.79769E+308

audunw• 6 years ago

Most of the generated images would just be noise though. You could probably be more clever than just generating random images, and have a decent chance of generating something that someone would design. These days you could use neural networks, but obviously that wasn’t feasible then

ninju• 6 years ago

A small tangent over to describing how many different permutations you can have with deck of cards

Taken from https://czep.net/weblog/52cards.html

So, just how large is it? Let's try to wrap our puny human brains around the magnitude of this number with a fun little theoretical exercise. Start a timer that will count down the number of seconds from 52! to 0. We're going to see how much fun we can have before the timer counts down all the way.

mooman2192• 6 years ago

An 8 by 8 bitmap has 64 pixels. there are 2^64 possible configurations of bitmaps, or 18,446,744,100,000,000,000.

Your average printer can print at 600 dots per inch^2. A4 paper is 11.69in by 8.27in, with an area of 96.6763in^2. You can fit 58005.78 dots on an A4 paper assuming you can print on the edges, double that for both sides at 116011.56 dots.

Ignoring actually fitting the bitmaps on the paper, you can store 1812 bitmaps per sheet of paper. You can roughly fit all possible combinations of bitmaps on 10,176,500,000,000,000 sheets of paper.

Typical office paper weighs 5 grams. Ignoring the weight of ink, your total mass of paper would be 50,882,500,000,000 kilograms of paper. Pluto weighs vastly more at 13,090,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms.

You definitely don't need a planet's mass worth of paper, but maybe a couple of planets worth of production however. We'd be more likely to see planet scale enslavement in a Douglas Adams galaxy wide copyright mockery scheme, which galactic court would likely throw out since they don't appreciate mockeries of law, leaving everyone a bit disappointed and with entirely too much visibly grey paper.

kabdib3• 6 years ago

(chuckles)

Now, for the colored bitmaps case, how much does the ink cost? :-)

We're also ignoring some edge effects, where bitmaps can be "shared" by sweeping an 8x8 frame across a printed page at the level of pixels to generate the patterns. I don't know how to think about the scale of that problem right now, don't even know if it's easy to do optimally or wickedly difficult, or if Knuth has a solution somewhere in Vol 4 . . .

yellowapple• 6 years ago

You could've settled for every 4×4 bitmap, of which there are only 65,536 black and white ones. Then you could claim any 8×8 bitmap as a derivative work (by concatenation/aggregation/whatever) of up to four of your 4×4 bitmaps.

kyancey• 6 years ago

Spoiler alert: This will not prevent lawsuits.

scotty792• 6 years ago

It wouldn't work in my country. Thing has to have individual creative quality to be copyrighted. Autogenerated stuff doesn't get copyright unless a human chose one of the autogenerated things for some particular creative reason. Then this thing gets copyright.

steelbird• 6 years ago

Which country?

scotty792• 6 years ago

Poland.

braindongle2• 6 years ago

Love the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lonesome Road, and put boundaries around melodies [2].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Larry-Polansky-Worlds-Longest-Melody/...

[1] https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIifUv1Tmk

eweise• 6 years ago

8 notes is what popular music is based on. I don't see why it matter what the tempo is. Pretty sure no one would be in danger of copyright infringement of a 17 month pause.

braindongle2• 6 years ago

8 notes is what popular music is based on.

OK, forget everything I said but the 8 notes thing. Just, no. "Yesterday"? Great melody. whistle just the first eight notes. "Yesterday, love was such an eas". Hmm. Wonder if there are more examples.

db48x5• 6 years ago

99% of all music is pop music, and the tuning system for all pop music is 12-tone equal temperament. Would a jury even be able to tell the difference between 12TET and just intonation?

DannyB2• 6 years ago

Not to cause a combinatorial explosion, but...

next they need to generate every possible chord progression underneath that melody.

JackFr3• 6 years ago

Won't they have inadvertently copyrighted tunes already under copyright? That is to say for anything written before this stunt, they've given away rights they don't own.

MoroCode2• 6 years ago

What an awesome effort. However, frivolous suits will still remain especially in places where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. A lot of these suits are filled knowing that they can't win but use the machinery to drain the defendant's resources until they are forced to submit because they have no means to fight it.

adamc• 6 years ago

If they have no means to fight it, where would the money come to pay it?

MoroCode2• 6 years ago

Might not be immediate money but could be something like owning the rights to a song. Also "some men just want to watch the world burn"

justaguyhere• 6 years ago

I wonder if someone has done this for other things like say, generating all possible combinations for 9*9 Sudoku etc

yepguy• 6 years ago

This is something else. What will happen to the origins of sound after all the sounds have sounded?

awwaiid• 6 years ago

Not the greatest recording, but fantastic lightning talk kinda along the same lines but for code, "Mark Dominus - Debugging the De Bruijn Sequence (YAPC::Asia 2007)"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QhtuG4htrb0

fargle• 6 years ago

All very interesting discussions. Some have broached on it, but let's be clear: mechanically generated sequences are not copyrightable. The program that generates them is, of course.

It doesn't matter if there isn't enough space to enumerate them all. It doesn't matter if most of them sound like crap. It doesn't matter if some match a pre-existing song. It doesn't matter if you do or do not highlight "interesting" songs.

The very fact that they are machine generated eliminates the element of creativity that is a central requirement to copyright.

Copyright law may be stupid, but it isn't this stupid. An even more stupid argument that isn't even valid doesn't really help.

503.03(a) Works-not originated by a human author.
In order to be entitled to copyright registration, a work must be the product of human authorship. Works produced by mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author are not registrable.

christiangenco• 6 years ago

Here's a quick app I made to page through and play each of the melodies in the All the Music catalog: https://gen.co/allthemusic/?notes=53325332

Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits

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