I might not think there is much creativity in a white line across a blue canvas or any in three blank white canvases, but someone thinks they are creative.
A lot of is about the intent of creating it but not the result. You can’t take a look at the final result and argue that it lacks creativity or artistic intent.
Let’s just check FutureLexisNexis for the trial transcript of the first case to use this.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: And that, your honor, is why my client is innocent of copyright infringement.
JUDGE: LOL, fuck you, no.
Important work that I wish had been done decades ago, to head off certain ridiculous copyright lawsuits. But then again, there are copyright lawsuits over music that doesn’t even share the same melody, so this won’t entirely stop them.
Though this is a rather different situation. The current musical copyright lawsuits are based on the idea that the earlier recorder of the melody was the originator of it, and anyone else recording it copied them (because you can’t prove the negative). But if that melody existed in concrete form before that first human recording, it still undermines their claim of uniqueness that’s the premise of their legal action. It definitely existed before they “created” it.
Back when icons were 16 by 16 pixels and either black and white or only 4 levels of grey, my brother and I considered registering all of them with the copyright office. Apparently, for long works, you could send them just the first and last n pages, where n was relatively small.
For all the reasons identified in this thread and a few other ones as well, my prediction as a (Canadian) lawyer who does a lot of copyright work: cute stunt but this will have zero impact on any future copyright lawsuits. Courts simply aren’t going to accept that the world of musical copyright is now totally irrelevant just because an algorithm brute-forced all these melodies.
Stuff like this comes up a lot: some tech-minded people come up with some hack that they think neatly eviscerates the law, making it totally irrelevant. While tech can certainly raise new legal issues, as it certainly has done in copyright, it’s never as clean cut as that.
From today’s Miss Manners:
Like non-lawyers who read about a law and believe they have caught a logical fallacy overlooked by legal scholars – only to discover that law school teaches more than persnicketiness…
Oh, that’s the phonebook people are always saying they’d listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing.
Especially since most of the recent cases involving copyright law were decided by people with no special musical knowledge, argued by “experts” whose expertise was not entirely relevant, as discussed in the video davide405 posted. “They sound the same to a lay person” shouldn’t be the standard for copyright damages. So I agree this MIDI library won’t solve anything. It’s kinda cool, but that’s about it. Here’s another Adam Neely video on the topic:
OK, 68 billion.A few thousand years.
But, I bet only a few million of them are melodious. An AI could be trained to pick those out.
It reads so much like overly geeky rules lawyers thinking that they’ve found a loophole, without taking into account that little things like context matter. As a YouTube copyright lawyer notes in a response video, it is doubtful that the “brute force” creation of the melodies would be deemed sufficiently creative for copyright protection to apply to those melodies (though the program that created them could itself be copyrighted). Also, it’s unlikely any judge or jury would find it meaningful that the melody exists in theoretical midi form when it’s unlikely either party to a lawsuit would have been exposed to it that way.
Well, the artwork in the case of enumerating all possible melodies is copyright trolling, not melodies. You have to look at that, not at any old random artifact. The melodies are more akin to the frame that holds the canvas.
You say copyright driving trollies, I say copyright protest, poe-tay-toe poe-tah-toe.
Except that for most paintings you can change or even take away the frame, and while that might change the impact of the art, it does not fundamentally change the art, but take away the database of melodies and it would fundamentally change the meaning of what they have done.
After the “Blured Lines” and similar recent cases a number of articles pointed out that an eventual result of these similar melodies cases would be that for each melody someone will have already used it, leaving no new melodies to be created. Take away the database and you have just one more group of people talking about what could happen. With the database of melodies you have a concrete statement that all melodies have been created. It makes it a statement of finality instead of a statement of speculation.
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