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Musicians Generated Every Possible Melody, Release Them to Public Domain (slashdot.org)
14 points by SomeSnail on Feb 25, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments



Though I am not a lawyer, I will jump to a conclusion that this strategy will fail.

First, algorithmically generating all length 12 sequences of 8 notes (2^36 = 64 G results) is just math, not music composition, even if you encode the results in midi format. Thus, not subject to copyright protection (in the U.S. anyway).

Next, a catalog of 64G entries is not human searchable. It is an unreasonable to state a person searched or could have the catalog, and copied an entry. Perhaps a program containing certain search criteria could scan the catalog looking for entries with "musical" attributes. However, such a program would not need the catalog, because it could generate every entry independently.

Since the output of this effort is neither subject to copyright nor human searchable, the effort will not mitigate copyright law suits. It seems a fruitless exercise. I suppose it was worth thinking about, though.

And that is my opinion.


Maybe this is the best attack on copyright we have. It at least proves the smartest in this case have good intentions.


what do you mean by “not human searchable”? we’ve indexed some pretty large resources before




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