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Comment by calibas | Hacker News Reader

If their legal argument is legit, it also means they just infringed upon the copyrights of most modern songs by attempting to release their melodies into public domain.

Someone who owns the copyrights to a song should sue them for a paltry sum, just to see how things play out in court.

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For there to be infringement, someone needs to prove that copying took place. Because of the algorithm these musicians used to generate this, they can prove mathematically that copying did not take place.

So if an algorithm you wrote produces a melody identical to a copyrighted work, you can claim copyright of the melody too?

I don't believe there's an objective right and wrong answer here, we're still figuring out how our legal system should adapt to modern technologies.

I think there is a difference in creating an algo that generates all possible solutions vs one that generates one specific solution.

No, it's not. One that generated a specific solution is given specific parameters. And those parameters can be, in their turn, just plugged in by a loop, hence generating everything.

Usually songs are between 2 and 5 minutes long. Therefore I can, theoretically speaking, write an algorithm, that can use linear interpolation, to generate all sounds, for all octaves, using 44KHz as sampling (the most usual track these days), and you can bet your rear latest pop or rock or whatever song will be generated as well - leaving me with only showing to court "here Your Honor, after looping through, my algorithm at mark xxx gazzilion generated this awesome piece of melody that you know from Youtube as <Lana Del Rey - Blue Jeans>"

So the Library of Babel for music?

https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?eofpgjcg.ggyvpzpti,...

^ search that bookmarked page in the Library of Babel for “jeans” ;)

On another note, since melodies can be encoded into a text format, the Library of Babel has actually done this too.

Heck, there’s a page in the Library of Babel that reads “Your honor, Lady Gaga will one day steal this melody from the library of babel, encoded here in text format: {melody for ‘Shallow’}”

which may look something like this (search “lady gaga” https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?vakuygoqaattmqm315 )

Sounds awesome. I agree with this 100% (both your sarcastic statement AND libraryofbabel)

And discussed in 1692, by Bernoulli, Mersenne and Kircher

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1979HisSc..17..258K...

Part of the law is that the infringer has to have had access to the work that he/she is accused of "stealing"

An Algorithm has no access and could have never heard the work in question..

The individual writing the algorithm certainly can have access. If I copy a song, I can't say that the tool I used didn't have access as a defense because that makes no sense.

> The individual writing the algorithm certainly can have access.

Sure he can have access, but looking at the algorithm you can prove without a doubt that the algorithm couldn't have access to it.

> If I copy a song, I can't say that the tool I used didn't have access as a defense because that makes no sense.

You could have given access to the song to the tools that you used though.

Sounds a bit like parallel construction...

> For there to be infringement, someone needs to prove that copying took place.

The argument isn't going to help. If you are creating every permutation in the purpose of publishing, you are inherently aware that you are intentionally copying published works (and are familiar with the concepts), even without specifically choosing to reproduce in each individual permutation.

What if a good actor who owned an infringed melody sued them with the intention of losing to set a good precedent?

Courts and bar associations tends to take a dim view of manufactured disagreements, so they'd better make sure to be good at just seeming incompetent.

But it's also not likely to be very effective unless you manage to trick a judge into issuing an overly broad judgement and manage to get it upheld on appeal.

The legally sanctioned version would be to seek a declarative judgement.

See vidarh's very good post which I won't repeat.

A court trail is not much a precedent. The judge can decide to not allow you to mention it. Even if a sympathetic judge (meaning faking neutral but really biased) does allow it, it will be with instructions that allow the next jury to ignore it.

To get a precedent you need to go to court. Then you need to appeal, and a court needs to agree to hear/rule on the appeal. Here you have a problem though: even if you conspire to lose, someone else can file an "Amicus brief" https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Amicus+brief and make a compelling argument that you overlooked. A first round appeal may not get this, but by the time it get to the supreme court (probably not even you - it generally takes dozens of different cases before it gets that far) there will be a lot of interest and your attempt to lose can still win because those who want to win can pour enough into their briefs.

They could, but what's the consequences of the court ruling in their "favor"? - Consequence would be that those artists have copyright to all future music, thus the one who sued couldn't create anything new and claim copyright in it but would have to pay royalties

I considered doing something like this project, but this was too big a red flag for me to ignore. It seems tractable to go through everything in the library of Congress, if it's already digitized, but that took this from pet project to big hustle

Well, maybe it's fair use to pull just the melody out of a full song, but it wouldn't be in the other direction since the original works here are just the melodies.

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