[HN Gopher] Copyrighting melodies to avoid accidental infringeme...
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Copyrighting melodies to avoid accidental infringement [video]
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 57 points
Date : 2020-02-11 18:30 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| Animats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| danellis wrote:
| To save the next person looking it up:
|
| "Diceware is a method for creating passphrases, passwords,
| and other cryptographic variables using ordinary dice as a
| hardware random number generator. For each word in the
| passphrase, five rolls of the dice are required. The numbers
| from 1 to 6 that come up in the rolls are assembled as a
| five-digit number, e.g. 43146. That number is then used to
| look up a word in a word list. In the English list 43146
| corresponds to munch. By generating several words in
| sequence, a lengthy passphrase can be constructed."
| kashgoudarzi wrote:
| Basically the original version of Pied Piper
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Copyright requires a creative act. Mechanically enumerating all
| combinations isn't creative.
| downerending wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Melodies aren't copyrighted. Music publishing is complicated,
| but in essence song = non-trivial melody + lyrics.
|
| "Non-trivial" doesn't have a formal definition, but it's
| guaranteed to be more complex than the 12^8 "melodies"
| generated here.
|
| Actual plagiarism cases get much more complex, because
| lawyers will argue that specific features of the song,
| including the arrangement, combination of instruments, and so
| on, all contribute.
|
| So the entire premise of this action is stupid. Nothing of
| value or interest has been copyrighted, and there is no
| chance the contents of that famous hard drive would stand up
| in a copyright claim against a commercial music release.
|
| IMO this is basically a PR stunt.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Including lyrics in the definition of 'song' probably
| muddies the waters here, given the loose colloquial usage
| of the word 'song' appears to include instrumental
| compositions
| bdowling wrote:
| 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.
| downerending wrote:
| There's probably a ML for that, or will be. Will it's
| output count as a significant creative act?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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_.
| kruasan wrote:
| That hard drive is basically just a reduced music version of The
| Library of Babel:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 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.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| 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.
| itronitron wrote:
| But can a person acquire copyright on a melody they wrote that
| was also previously algorithmically generated?
| seandougall wrote:
| You can generally only copyright the parts you change. Sort
| of like how Disney can copyright their version of Rapunzel,
| but they don't own the fairy tale.
|
| (Edit: that's assuming you're asking about a derivative work,
| which I may have misunderstood)
| itronitron wrote:
| I guess my question is more focused on whether a person can
| copyright something they created that was created by
| something else previously. So, if a musician creates a
| melody and then later finds that same melody was previously
| recorded on an album from the 1990's can they still
| copyright _their_ melody? Does it matter whether the 1990
| 's recording was machine-generated melodies or human-
| generated ones?
| jordigh wrote:
| Some people have been claiming copyright on algorithmic
| outputs. Wolfram is one such prominent example. I don't know if
| it's ever been challenged, but he does claim all output of
| Alpha is copyrighted to him.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically
| generated music isn't copyrightable.
|
| As far as I can tell, that's not always true. For now it seems
| largely context-specific, provided that a human wrote the
| software generating the output. There's a relatively well-known
| legal case of someone writing numerological software to
| generate eschatological texts, where the texts themselves were
| found to be copyrightable.
|
| The USPTO is currently soliciting comments on whether and under
| what circumstances AI-generated outputs should be copyrightable
| [1].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-10-30/pdf/2019-2...
| munificent wrote:
| On the other hand, most other photos _are_ copyright by the
| person who took the photo. However, in those cases, it was a
| camera that took the photo, not a human. The camera contained a
| digital computer that executed code (not even written by the
| photographer in this case!) in order to produce a series of
| values stored on digital media. All the human did was push a
| button to tell it to go.
|
| There is also a long history of generative art and as far as I
| know, the author of the code retains full copyright to the
| works produced by the program.
| bdowling wrote:
| 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....
|
| [1]
| http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usr...
|
| 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.
| blackearl wrote:
| What if you record a robot playing the notes on a piano?
| inetknght wrote:
| Better question: what if a robot records itself playing the
| notes on a piano?
| exabrial wrote:
| Many game engine studios are claiming the graphic image outputs
| of their game engines are copyrighted. Most definitely, they
| are computer generated.
|
| What about CGI in movie scenes? Also algorithmically generated.
| dahfizz wrote:
| The "creative" aspect is what's important. Designing the
| sprites, backgrounds, art styles, etc of a videogames is
| creative.
|
| It's harder to argue that brute force generating every single
| possible sequence of musical notes is creative.
| capableweb wrote:
| I guess you can make the argument that coding up the
| solution that does the generating of the music is the
| creative part here, just as with games where the creative
| process is creating the environment for example.
|
| I guess music that is made by programming is just as
| copyrightable as "normal" music. With Ableton/Max Live and
| similar, programming and music production is getting closer
| and closer to each other anyways.
| jerf wrote:
| "I guess you can make the argument that coding up the
| solution that does the generating of the music is the
| creative part here"
|
| They unambiguously have a copyright to whatever software
| they wrote to create this output. You do not in general
| get copyright to the output of software, though. (You may
| in specific. I'm not getting too detailed here. But you
| definitely do not in general.)
| alasdair_ wrote:
| If he just remembered to take a photograph of the photograph
| and only share that version, he'd have been all set :)
| wefarrell wrote:
| "Monkey Selfie" is not a good analogy for algorithmically
| generated music. A better analogy would be satellite images,
| which of course are copyrightable.
| exabrial wrote:
| What about syth arpeggiators? Essentially it allows you to push
| one key on a keyboard and the computer plays notes and chords
| according to an algorithmic sequence. These are used heavily in
| pop and EDM music.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Here's how you can get it: http://allthemusic.info/
|
| Here's how they did it: https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli
| psychometry wrote:
| Neither of these pages explain how the project works and why a
| musician would want to use one of the melodies.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| cosmojg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "Information wants to be free!"
|
| "Please stop giving my personal information to everyone!"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Privacy and copyright are completely separate issues.
| boublepop wrote:
| It's only stupid until someone else is making millions based on
| something they copied from you. While overzealous copyright
| protection is definitely bad, there are people out there who
| created something beautiful but didn't catch a big audience and
| then only got paid later down the line because they managed to
| challenge the big guys in court.
|
| But naturally in those cases there was actual and obvious
| theft, not just similar melodies.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > someone else is making millions based on something they
| copied from you
|
| But why is this a problem, though? Why does it matter if
| someone else makes money on something they copied? Isn't that
| how capitalism is supposed to work? The idea that nothing
| would be created unless there is financial incentive is silly
| - people create things all the time with the expectation (and
| hope!) that they will be copied and that others can enrich
| themselves on the basis of that.
|
| And I think the point OP is making is that it would be great
| as a species to have less interest in who makes the most
| money, and more interest in other things, like maybe the art
| itself.
| caconym_ wrote:
| Creating art beyond a hobby level is hard if you aren't
| being paid to do it, because skill and mastery in any
| medium take time, and so does the practice that produces
| results.
|
| Somewhat separate from that, the idea of somebody making
| life-changing sacrifices to pursue art in the gaps between
| their soul-crushing job only to have a BigCorp claim that
| art as their own and profit off it without the actual
| creator getting anything for it is what I'd call
| fundamentally unjust and broken.
|
| In sum, if good artists can't make a living off their art
| then we will enjoy less good art as a result. A lot of
| great artists don't care about money, but they need it to
| live and keep making art, and it's naive to suggest they
| should be "above" that.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| While this can certainly be true, copyright itself
| doesn't necessarily follow-
|
| Problem: Artists need to make money!
|
| Solution: We'll make unauthorized use of certain material
| illegal for a fixed period.
|
| It's certainly _one_ approach, and it does mesh with the
| intuitive sense of "hey, it's fucked up to take somebody
| else's work and call it your own"- but it's not the only,
| or, in my view, the best approach.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I have no idea whether or not it's the _best_ approach,
| but it 's certainly the best approach I've seen so far.
| Unless you have a better alternative to propose?
| caconym_ wrote:
| What is, in your view, the best approach? Please
| enlighten us.
|
| edit: I guess I should also clarify that I believe
| artists are entitled to total control over something
| they've created until they say otherwise. If they want to
| license it as creative commons and go live in a wine
| cask, great. If they want to milk it for all (the money)
| it's worth, also great, at least for as long as we're
| living under the capitalist ethic that celebrates such
| exploitation of intellectual property and provides no
| safety net for those who are unwilling or unable to
| extract value from what they have available to them.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It seems to me that our economy of attention, where
| consumption literally requires copying the product in our
| own brain, needs a better conceptual foundation.
|
| Like, a tax designed to be distributed to creators
| according to market principles in a manner that supports a
| vibrant and robust media society.
|
| And while it is easy to imagine versions of that post-
| scarcity media market that would _not_ work well, I think
| we really need to consider the possibility that it 's just
| a matter of the _right_ design.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And perhaps also recognizing that we _already are_ living
| on the edge of having a post-scarcity market in digital
| media, and that our real media market is one of those
| that do not work well. We don 't have a best possible
| market, we have a random one we walked into via path
| dependence.
| yomly wrote:
| Because in a capitalist world without this kind of
| safeguard creators would all be at the mercy of money rich
| megacorps who can copy any work and out-maneuver them in
| distribution and advertising.
|
| All while making platforms richer.
| itronitron wrote:
| That is going to happen regardless of the safeguard,
| because we have the safeguard and creators are already
| outmaneuvered. If the safeguard is removed then at least
| megacorps won't have an eternal lock on creative works.
| cryptoz wrote:
| Sure, I agree, but isn't that seen as a good thing in the
| capitalist perspective? Wouldn't you want to have that
| accumulation of wealth by the few, who can then wield
| that power, as a proponent of capitalism?
|
| The problem is capitalism and the greed/ability to hoard
| wealth. The problem isn't that creators are having their
| work copied; art is going to be copied, that's what art
| is in the first place - inspiration, modification,
| creation from something else that already exists.
|
| There ought not to be such capitalism that creates the
| 'need' for the copyright protections.
| Asooka wrote:
| >Sure, I agree, but isn't that seen as a good thing in
| the capitalist perspective? Wouldn't you want to have
| that accumulation of wealth by the few, who can then
| wield that power, as a proponent of capitalism?
|
| No. Capitalism works when people are equals, which is why
| we need a strong Democracy and brakes on unchecked money-
| earning optimisation. We must maximise people's freedom
| to create.
|
| Personally the form of copyright I would support would be
| something like
|
| 1. Sharing without direct monetary gain is allowed. The
| reason I don't see a problem with this is because we
| already have a vibrant piracy culture and yet people want
| to pay creators. As long as you're not getting paid for
| warez it doesn't seem like it would be a problem in
| itself. Ad-supported torrent index sites would also be OK
| because they're not profiting off the warez themselves,
| they're just providing a search index. This is basically
| updating libraries to the 21st century.
|
| 2. As a creator you own an exclusive right to your
| creations and you cannot give that right away. So if you
| write a song as a "work for hire", you can still sample
| the song you wrote. You can change it and release it on
| your own. If you are a programmer, you cannot have your
| code taken away. If you write e.g. a UI component and
| then decide you want to make your own site, you can still
| use that UI component freely. Of course you can give a
| permanent non-exclusive license to your employer to do
| whatever they want with your
| code/song/dance/performance/etc.
|
| This will maximise the freedom to create, minimise
| exploitation of artists and knowledge workers, and
| maximise the freedom to share culture, while still
| affording creators enough protection to make sure others
| aren't unduly profiting from their creations.
|
| I'm not sure about the length of copyright though. The
| easy thing would be to say it should be 10 years, with
| exponentially increasing renewal fees, but I'm not sure
| that's the best idea. Another option is compulsory
| licensing, where someone who profits from your work has
| to pay you a fee proportional to how much of his creation
| uses how much of your creation. That idea has some gnarly
| enforcement problems however, and I suspect big companies
| will just tread over little guys who can't litigate
| anyway.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Personally, I'm currently for short copyright lengths -
| and industry-dependent, based on independent estimate of
| true ROI and technology turnover, and balanced against
| the public good. So e.g. in chemistry/drug manufacturing
| this could be a decade, in software industry no more than
| two-three years. Definitely not "almost a century _after_
| the death of the author ".
|
| I would be a bit conscious about the "sharing without
| direct monetary gain" part, I'd like it to explicitly
| exclude "sharing for free in exchange for viewing ads
| (and accepting tracking)". I think "free with ads"
| business models are fundamentally anticompetitive and
| poisonous to our society; you can find them at the center
| of a lot of problems currently afflicting the western
| world. I would like to see these business models gone.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're entirely right, except that dismantling capitalism
| can't start with dismantling copyright, it's not a big
| enough piece to fundamentally change our society in that
| way.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Aren't they already? Isn't this literally the problem
| that motivated this music generation experiment?
| groby_b wrote:
| People might create things all the time - creating things
| that are actually worth sharing takes much more, though,
| because you'll first need to master the domain you work in.
| (Nobody is ripping off your "hello world" :)
|
| That time investment is time you take away from other
| things. If that is also time that translates into money
| that actually enables you to live, the copier stands to
| benefit from your work, while you struggle for your
| livelihood.
|
| That's why that is a problem. If there is no IP at all,
| you've limited the set of creators to people who are
| essentially independently wealthy and simultaneously want
| to actually invest time to master that domain. That's a
| small set.
|
| Sure, once you fix the basic livelihood problem, copying
| might be good. Capitalism doesn't let you fix the
| livelihood problem. (Because it does attach value to your
| time)
| cycloptic wrote:
| >That's why that is a problem. If there is no IP at all,
| you've limited the set of creators to people who are
| essentially independently wealthy and simultaneously want
| to actually invest time to master that domain. That's a
| small set.
|
| This is a really fruitless way to take the discussion in
| and it misses the point entirely. I could argue that the
| way things are now, you've limited the set of artists to
| people who happen to get chosen by "the algorithm" for
| whatever reason, which is a similarly small set. We could
| then go and compare sizes of these small sets just to try
| and rationalize things. But that doesn't really advance
| the discussion does it? Groups who want to do bigger
| things still need to do fundraising to fix the
| "livelihood problem" and then they need to spend big on
| marketing in order to recoup the costs. What that means
| is the same as always: applying for grants, going to
| investors, running a crowdfunding campaign, etc. It
| really has nothing to do with copying at that point.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Do you think those investors want to see a return on that
| investment?
|
| Where do you think that return on investment will come
| from if the product is free?
|
| For better or worse this is literally what record labels
| and publishers do - invest in new talent, handle
| marketing and promotion, spread the investment around and
| hope to win big on a handful of hits which pay for the
| misses.
|
| Do you really think tech VCs invented this model?
|
| Publisher/investors/labels/agents/promoters have been
| doing it since at least the 19th century.
| cycloptic wrote:
| No offense but your whole post is a straw man. I never
| said anything about anything being free. Although if you
| want to post videos for free on youtube, that seems to be
| a popular choice for a lot of people these days.
|
| Anyway this is why I didn't want to discuss things in
| that direction, because it _always_ leads to people
| attacking the argument with totally nonsensical
| conclusions. Of course the concept of patronage wasn 't
| invented by tech VCs or kickstarter or whatever you're
| thinking of. Can we try to think about this
| constructively?
| Isamu wrote:
| >Why does it matter if someone else makes money on
| something they copied?
|
| When the copy competes with the original. The original
| required investment of effort and resources, the copy is
| near-zero effort.
|
| This is the case for certain original content video
| channels, where their content is literally copied and
| monetized, competing for the same viral links and diverting
| traffic from the original.
| apodysophilia wrote:
| There is no right to be free from competition.
| rebuilder wrote:
| But unfair competition is often legislated against.
|
| Without copyright, competition would not be for the
| ability to create -it would be for the ability to
| distribute. The end result would be much the same as we
| have now - an oligopoly of distribution channels, only
| they'd pay the artists less, if anything.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The problem you mention is essentially that people with
| more money and business acumen (here: social media
| companies) will leverage said money/business acumen to
| make even more money (here: promoting videos and reaping
| virality-driven ad revenue). They will amplify their
| initial business advantage to outcompete those skilled in
| the subject-matter work. Under capitalism, it's as often
| considered a feature as it is a bug; which one it is in
| any particular case depends on how popular the people
| getting outcompeted are.
|
| Hindsight is 20/20, but to me, copyright law looks a bit
| like an ass-backwards, cart-before-horse approach. It's
| the legal equivalent of "solving" SQL injection by adding
| a client-side validation that prevents users from
| entering ' and the word "DROP" in their form fields. All
| it does is inviting exploitation.
|
| Instead of making ridiculous kludges that end up
| benefiting those they were meant to curtail, perhaps we
| need to figure out a proper solution.
| tgv wrote:
| > The idea that nothing would be created unless there is
| financial incentive is silly
|
| As is the implication that financial incentive doesn't
| work.
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(page generated 2020-02-11 23:00 UTC)