Hacker News Reader

Comment by iraphael | Hacker News Reader

According to their pricing page ( https://www.jukedeck.com/pricing ), you can use the track free of royalty, but if you want to actually own it, you have to pay $199.

But this falls kind of in a gray area. If the AI created the tracks, why does the company own the copyright (and thus, have the right to sell it)? In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works created by a non-human are not subject to U.S. copyright (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie#Copyright_issues ). So, in theory, AI could also own copyright.

Moreover, do they actually check every newly generated track to make sure its not too similar to previously-sold tracks?

View on HN

This isn't a legal opinion and shouldn't be taken as legal advice.

Interestingly, I think New Zealand law does have this case covered. There's special mention of "computer-generated" works under Section 5[1] of the Copyright Act which states (as I read it) that the person who wrote the computer program to generate the audio is the author of the audio.

[1] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/D...

EDIT: Had another read and thought that actually it could also be the person that inputted their choices into the computer program that undertook "the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work"... Copyright is a murky section of law.

What happens if write a program to generate all data in the world? 000000 000001 000010 000011 000100 Do I own every file?

Even if you've never generated the files?

I remember someone created a P2P file sharing system that used 'munges' of files to create blocks of data by themselves that have no meaning (a bit like http://monolith.sourceforge.net/). These blocks were then transferred around the network, and people could claim "I'm not transferring files, I'm transferring meaningless blocks of data".

Sure, but (and I'm not a lawyer), intent of law is just as important as the literal meaning of law. Cases play out this intent and add to the corpus of knowledge as case law. So if you did write a program to generate all the data in the world, I'd imagine people would look at your intent, rather than just what you literally did.

I believe you are talking about Freenet [1], right?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

Illegal numbers!

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

No, because you didn't create those other files, your enumerated bits won't have the right color ;)

"Bits don't have Colour; computer scientists, like computers, are Colour-blind. That is not a mistake or deficiency on our part: rather, we have worked hard to become so. Colour-blindness on the part of computer scientists helps us understand the fact that computers are also Colour-blind, and we need to be intimately familiar with that fact in order to do our jobs.

The trouble is, human beings are not in general Colour-blind. The law is not Colour-blind. It makes a difference not only what bits you have, but where they came from. [...] The law sees Colour.

Suppose you publish an article that happens to contain a sentence identical to one from this article, like "The law sees Colour." That's just four words, all of them common, and it might well occur by random chance. Maybe you were thinking about similar ideas to mine and happened to put the words together in a similar way. If so, fine. But maybe you wrote "your" article by cutting and pasting from "mine" - in that case, the words have the Colour that obligates you to follow quotation procedures and worry about "derivative work" status under copyright law and so on. Exactly the same words - represented on a computer by the same bits - can vary in Colour and have differing consequences. When you use those words without quotation marks, either you're an author or a plagiarist depending on where you got them, even though they are the same words. It matters where the bits came from." - from http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Basically, non-recorded metadata about how a sequence of bits was created matters too. Not just the bits themselves.

This is an amazingly good description on the difference between the digital and real world. Thanks for linking this.

You'd run out of disk space before you even generated "Hello, World". Assuming ASCII only, that's 96 bits. In order to save every possible character combination you'd need about 9903 yottabytes [1] of storage.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte

Why not go full infinite monkey and do:

  cat /dev/random > /dev/eth0

Now you've simultaneously copyright infringed all the worlds works by sharing them on the internet, AND generated all other works, making it impossible for anyone else to ever not infringe on your work.

Isn't the world a wonderfully messy place?

</hyperbole>

I like this.

Already being done commercially http://www.qentis.com

This reminds of Pi file system, where everything is already stored, but you simply reference it.

If you went through and sorted those which were pleasant from those which weren't, you would own all those you sorted. Good luck getting even one picture that looked anything more than static or pure color.

Here's an—in my opinion—almost exact equivalence: a font is a little program in a nearly-Turing-complete language. Nobody really cares what fonts end up on your computer. But if you create an image (e.g. an advertisement) that contains pixels manipulated by the font-program you ran on your own computer, then you have to pay to license that use of the font.

Within the realm of audio production, there's an even closer equivalence: soundfonts, which are also little nearly-Turing-complete programs. Playing a MIDI file "through" a soundfont? No problem. Putting that track on a CD and selling it? Nope, need to license the font.

Really, you could think of procedural music generation as a really complex and "stateful" soundfont program that has a nonlinear relationship with its input.

But in your examples derivative product depends on creative input which was put into original product. Music generating AI can be replaced by other AI created by different people but on the same principles so it produces similar music. Binaries produced by gcc don't bear GPL license and Adobe can not dictate license on pictures created in Photoshop.

> Binaries produced by gcc don't bear GPL license and Adobe can not dictate license on pictures created in Photoshop.

I don't think there's anything legally stopping either behavior; it's just that neither GNU nor Adobe are in a market position where anyone would put up with that sort of behavior.

US law in this area is interesting. There is no "sweat of the brow" copyright in the US. This was clearly established in Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the Supreme Court decision that it was permissible to copy data from telephone books into a database. The Constitution gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", and the Supreme Court says Congress can't go beyond that in intellectual property law. The US, therefore, has no database copyright, although some countries do.

This was followed by the famous Bridgeman vs. Corel, which established that taking a picture of a work doesn't create a new copyright. Thus, pictures of public domain works are public domain. Despite much huffing and puffing and disinformation by the museum community, that's now settled law. Nobody has gone to court to try to overturn it. (The National Portrait Gallery (UK) threatened to sue Wikipedia, then backed down once they realized they would lose.) There's also Meshwerks vs Toyota; a 3D scan of a physical object doesn't create a new copyright in the 3D scan. That's an appellate decision and reaffirmed Bridgeman.

So, for copyright in the US, there must be an Author. (This can be a corporation, but that comes under the law on work-for-hire; the individuals involved are the initial authors but the rights accrue to the employer.) You can make a strong argument that under US law, works created by computers are not copyrightable.

Digital tools are used all the time by artists to create works that they own. Doesn't this count as a more complex tool to generate digital works that they own?

Kind of like a studio letting you use their equipment under a prior agreement that anything you generate they own until you purchase it.

  > You can make a strong argument that under US law, works
  > created by computers are not copyrightable.

I'm genuinely not sure what "works created by computers" means.

I don't know exactly how Jukedeck works, but it seems self evident that it is the product of a huge number of creative decisions - which sound samples to include or generate, which sounds can be combined in a pleasing way, which melodic patterns are appropriate for various genres, how melodic patterns are modulated over time, etc. etc.

It's not as if the Jukedeck team created a general purpose AI and said "go make some music". They designed a system that can generate a limited (though large) range of music based on their own sense of creativity, taste and style. I argue that the music generated by such a system is clearly creative expression and thus subject to copyright to the same degree as traditional creative expression.

I do not think "sweat of the brow" decisions are relevant here. The lack of "sweat of the brow" copyright means that simply performing labor without a creative element does not qualify the product of that labor for copyright protection. There must be a creative spark present in the generation or transformation of the work.

The fact that, with Jukedeck, the creative spark happens at the time of producing and editing the code rather than at the time of the code generating the music is not relevant in my opinion.

Their marketing copy puts it into a murky area, too. "You have control over your music, so you can create tracks that do exactly what you want." That certainly implies you're the creator, in the same way that an artist who uses tools in Photoshop to make a picture owns the copyright on the picture, rather than Adobe (or perhaps more pertinently, someone who uses Garageband loops to construct a song owns the copyright on the song, not Apple). So I agree - the 'pay this much and it assigns you the copyright' seems like a bit of a dubious claim...

That could imply that you have a license to use the work, rather than ownership.

"If the AI created the tracks, why does the company own the copyright (and thus, have the right to sell it)?"

The same reason artists like Autechre deserve to own the copyright to music they created using algorithms. They wrote the software that made the song, it's just somewhat more abstracted version of composing isn't it?

> If the AI created the tracks, why does the company own the copyright

Uh, do you think there's a sentient being here? Its just a relatively simple algorithm here (at least compared to sci-fi style AI), the same kind of thing that decides how to autofix colors in photos or do a transform in photoshop.

Dynamic music generation has been a thing since at least the 80s. I think I had an Apple// program that did this.

>works created by a non-human are not subject to U.S. copyright

I'd like to see you prove some silly music generator is on the equal footing of a living and intelligent animal to any court. I can't imagine you not being laughed out of courtroom.

The program wouldn't own the copyright, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the company which made the program would own the copyright. It could end up public domain.

E.g. the recently infamous selfie by a monkey was ruled public domain, having been produced by a non-human.

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

Software expressly created by a human here.

Doesn't hold up. Library of Babel and the Universal Slideshow would be able to claim copyright on all photographs and literature because all photographs and all literature that ever will be or ever was is contained within their corpus/gallery.

Every picture you've ever taken, the Universal Slideshow already contains that picture. The picture of your birth, every memorable moment of your life, and every possible variation of your death.

[0] http://libraryofbabel.info/

[1] https://babelia.libraryofbabel.info/slideshow.html

They probably would only have copyright over what they create, not everything they could create

Everything is already created. In regards to the Library of Babel, you can even search the library to verify this. (There is an extended Library that contains entire novels to be searched - the web version is a bit smaller/limited to pages.)

It's already there it just needs to be found. That's the entire point!

This is a false claim. The Library of Babel is far from complete; the site itself only claims completion up to 3200-character texts. And that's limited only to lower-case alphabetic letters, periods, commas, and spaces. So there is still a vast amount of possible texts that haven't yet been created.

Irrelevant. It includes numerous works within those constraints that would ordinarily be subject to copyright. I tried it with a variety of short poems I know, both in and out of copyright, so there's more than enough amterial here for a test case, even though it doesn't include all possible material.

The Library of Babel that is online has those limits, yes. Which is why I explicitly mentioned I wasn't referring to the website.

>(There is an extended Library that contains entire novels to be searched - the web version is a bit smaller/limited to pages.)

The creator has variations of the code that aren't online. For example, lower-case alphabetical letters was a choice to "remain true to the original concept" but a base64 variation that allows for capital letters is possible. Furthermore - searching for entire books rather than being limited to 3,200 characters is also possible. Also other languages would also be possible but require further variations of the code.

It's just having this work on the web to a website that sees 30-40k daily visitors because the algorithm isn't fast enough to meet those demands.

[0] https://libraryofbabel.info/forum/?bbp_user=1&bbp_reps=1&pag...

Rate limited in posts. My reply to the below is as follows:

Your claims only hold for the web version. I was not speaking of the web version. So you are explicitly wrong. There is a version of the library that is not limited to those characters, that is not limited to lowercase Latin alphabet, and is not limited to being searched 3,200 characters at a time. So what are you contending by making such statements?

Yes. The web version is held to those limits. Which is why I explicitly mentioned I was not referring to the web version. Your claims only hold against the web version. So I'm not seeing the point you are trying to make here.

E2:

I hate how HN rate limits like this. :)

I'll concede that. Does ASCII art of a Chinese character represent the same information as the Chinese character? That's stretching things so I'm not making that as a counterpoint - but more of a thought experiment.

For example: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?ygofnzdyjijlsc299

I'm not challenging the claim that it contains a lot of texts; I'm challenging the claim that "everything has already been created and just needs to be found." That claim is explicitly false, regardless of the version of the Library of Babel you are using.

Edit: Reply to your reply: One inherent limitation with the current code is that it has to assume some encoding. Currently, there is no encoding that contains all known glyphs (e.g the Prince symbol, uncommon kanji, etc) so there will be texts that can not currently be generated, regardless of how much you increase the character set.

Edit2: Even if one were to allow ASCII art to represent a character, you then have the problem of how to distinguish between ASCII art substitution and actual ASCII art. Consider "Densha Otoko," which basically consists of message board posts that often contain ASCII art.

http://portal.nifty.com/2007/04/15/b/img/012.jpg

I don't get that monkey selfie ruling. If the photographer deliberately gave the monkey a camera to take pictures, shouldn't the photographer be the owner of it? If the monkey isn't a legal entity, why is it considered the creator? If I dropped my camera on the floor and the button got pressed, is the floor now the creator of the image? If I set the automatic-timer function on my camera, is the timer mechanism now the creator of the image?

There is no point in the process where a human puts a creative stamp on the result. Your chiptunes did. This is effectively a fancy PRNG tuned to create appealing patterns. Copyright doesn't apply to non-creative works.

The author of the work created the scenario which resulted in the work. There was intent, effort, and creativity involved in this.

> the same kind of thing that decides how to autofix colors in photos or do a transform in photoshop

Why doesn't then Adobe own result of whatever "autofix colors" produces?

exactly

Reply on news.ycombinator.com