Eliminating future song copyright lawsuits via brute force?

[beagledave]

Very interesting (to me) notion. What would happen if you could brute force ALL (at least those that occur in pop and classical music, for now) possible melodies, save that data set to a hard drive, and place that in the public domain? In theory, you would have covered all past melodies AND all future melodies, thus eliminating (again..in theory) copyright lawsuits.

Very interesting intersection of music, law and software. (Watch both, they cover the anticipated arguments)

The TED Talk



A further discussion

And you can go ahead and own all of the melodies every created (or will be created), for free. Right here.

[rz]

Reminds me of a story I read about a guy who wrote to a guitar magazine back in the early 70s saying that by the year 2000, all possible melodies and chord structures would have been recorded. Guess that didn't quite happen...

[RE:up]

There are only 12 notes.

[datbeme]

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/w...ranscript/

[Sarcany]

beagledave wrote: ...thus eliminating (again..in theory) copyright lawsuits.

It potentially affects copyright lawsuits based on the appropriation of a single measure following an 8-note pattern.

But really, it's BS. Copyright law is not supposed to protect simple sequences of notes because there's a limited number of ways to put them together to perform any given work, making them utilitarian. Judgments in favor of plaintiffs when such appropriations occur, are "bad." (Decided incorrectly.) Unfortunately, if you have enough money and get lucky with a dumb or prejudiced judge, you can buy a bad judgment pretty easily and it's both expensive to fight and to appeal.

And this stunt probably wouldn't have any influence like the most famous case of note-appropriation, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord."
http://performingsongwriter.com/george-h...weet-lord/

If you scroll down in the next link, you'll see mention that the expert witness for Harrison argued that the motifs were in the public domain. The judge opted to disregard it.
https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/brig...ngs-music/

[beagledave]

Sarcany wrote:
[quote=beagledave]...thus eliminating (again..in theory) copyright lawsuits.

It potentially affects copyright lawsuits based on the appropriation of a single measure following an 8-note pattern.

But really, it's BS. Copyright law is not supposed to protect simple sequences of notes because there's a limited number of ways to put them together to perform any given work, making them utilitarian. Judgments in favor of plaintiffs when such appropriations occur, are "bad." (Decided incorrectly.) Unfortunately, if you have enough money and get lucky with a dumb or prejudiced judge, you can buy a bad judgment pretty easily and it's both expensive to fight and to appeal.

And this stunt probably wouldn't have any influence like the most famous case of note-appropriation, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord."
http://performingsongwriter.com/george-h...weet-lord/

If you scroll down in the next link, you'll see mention that the expert witness for Harrison argued that the motifs were in the public domain. The judge opted to disregard it.
https://blogs.law.gwu.edu/mcir/case/brig...ngs-music/
IANAL, but the two guys doing this ARE lawyers who work with copyright cases. In this case, there isn't just an arbitrary notion of "hey, this musical sequence is out there in the public domain" like in the Harrison case. Here the sequence is (a) attached to a physical medium an (b) released as public domain.

In the TED talk, he points out that one of their goals is to move the determination of "facts" event to the beginning of a legal timeline/trial. Generally, that process doesn't occur until much later (and much more $$)

[rjmacs]

I'm glad we don't broadly operate under a Napoleonic legal system.