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Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically generated music isn't copyrightable. A copyright can only cover "significantly creative" works.

Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically generated music isn't copyrightable. A copyright can only cover "significantly creative" works. One example is David Slater's "Monkey Selfie", the fact that the photo merely exists doesn't make it copyrightable, it matters how it was created. Had he taken the photo himself, it would be copyrightable. In this specific case, it was a computer that created the music, not a human.

itronitron 7y ago
But can a person acquire copyright on a melody they wrote that was also previously algorithmically generated?
- seandougall 7y ago
  You can generally only copyright the parts you change. Sort of like how Disney can copyright their version of Rapunzel, but they don’t own the fairy tale. (Edit: that’s assuming you’re asking about a derivative work, which I may have misunderstood)
  - itronitron 7y ago
    I guess my question is more focused on whether a person can copyright something they created that was created by something else previously. So, if a musician creates a melody and then later finds that same melody was previously recorded on an album from the 1990's can they still copyright their melody? Does it matter whether the 1990's recording was machine-generated melodies or human-generated ones?
    - singron 7y ago
      This is discussed in the video somewhat. Copyright allows parallel invention. E.g. 2 people can copyright the same thing as long as neither one copied the other. In the video, they claim this is usually difficult to prove in court if the first work had at least moderate notoriety before the second was produced.
munificent 7y ago
On the other hand, most other photos are copyright by the person who took the photo. However, in those cases, it was a camera that took the photo, not a human. The camera contained a digital computer that executed code (not even written by the photographer in this case!) in order to produce a series of values stored on digital media. All the human did was push a button to tell it to go. There is also a long history of generative art and as far as I know, the author of the code retains full copyright to the works produced by the program.
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  I think you were trying to be a bit disingenuous, but that is actually true. Just because a human pressed a button on a camera does not mean the image is copyrightable. Example case [1] 1: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/18-13233/18-13233-2019-05-01.html https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/1...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- vanniv 7y ago
  Generally, the human applies creativity in choosing the location, angle, exposure settings, and timing of "pressing the button"
bdowling 7y ago
Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the arrangement of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., Feist v. Rural, U.S. 1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that listed names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... [1] http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usrep499340.pdf http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usr... Regarding David Slater's "Monkey Selfies", as far as I can tell, no court decided the question of whether the photo was copyrightable or whether the copyright belonged to Slater, only that it could not belong to the monkey.
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  Slater never filed a suit against anyone, so no court ever ruled on it. But he did request it removed from Wikimedia, and lots of experts weighed in. The WikiPedia page has summaries and links to lots of sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- SilasX 7y ago
  >Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the arrangement of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., Feist v. Rural, U.S. 1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that listed names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable). Was there a reason you mentioned this? I don't see the relevance to the surrounding discussion.
  - bdowling 7y ago
    A listing of all the possible melodies of a certain length is a list of facts. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
    - SilasX 7y ago
      In don’t think anyone mentioned a listing of all possible melodies either, and if you think something they did mention is functionally equivalent, it would help if you made that explicit. Algorithmically generated music is not such a list, and does not involve publishing such a list, as no one would want that. They typically involve a lot of selection and choices by the author. They’re only algorithm-generated on the sense that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was “brush-generated”.
blackearl 7y ago
What if you record a robot playing the notes on a piano?
- inetknght 7y ago
  Better question: what if a robot records itself playing the notes on a piano?
wefarrell 7y ago
"Monkey Selfie" is not a good analogy for algorithmically generated music. A better analogy would be satellite images, which of course are copyrightable.
- kragen 7y ago
  I think it's crystal clear under US copyright law that on-nadir satellite images are not copyrightable; the elements of creative expression that normally give copyrightability to a photograph (composition, lighting, framing, choice of angle) are entirely absent. Feist, Hearn, and Bridgeman seem to provide a clear-cut answer in such cases. What jurisprudence are you thinking of?
  - wefarrell 7y ago
    Here are some sources that say they are copyrightable: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=njilb https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 Any GIS tool with satellite images (Google earth/maps, Bing maps, etc...) will show a copyright logo on the screen specific to the satellite images.
    - kragen 7y ago
      From your second link https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=njilb https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten..., which is a law review article, not precedent or statute: "Copyright protection is thus unavailable to unenhanced data. ... Predictably, EOSAT does not attempt to copyright unenhanced Landsat data." However, it's from 1990, prior to Feist (1991) and Bridgeman (1999), though not Hearn (1987). Even so, it doesn't attempt to make the argument that you're making, that raw satellite photos themselves are subject to copyright: "The statutory definition of a copyright certainly suggests that...data which has been enhanced through human creativity qualifies for protection." (Emphasis mine.) Law review articles, like legal briefs, are primarily attempts to advocate a certain point of view by presenting the best available arguments for it, in the hopes of influencing future jurisprudence or legislation. The positions they advocate are thus not reliable guides to reality, although they are more persuasive to the extent that their arguments are based on reality and thus not easily demolished. The other two https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 and https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 not only aren't jurisprudence, they aren't even law review articles, nor do they reference any jurisprudence or make any legal arguments. Also, they are both from Singapore. Actually they are papers about steganography, not copyright. Did you... did you just google [satellite image copyright] and paste the first few links you saw without reading them, hoping you could waste a bunch of my time for a minimal amount of effort on your part?
jordigh 7y ago
Some people have been claiming copyright on algorithmic outputs. Wolfram is one such prominent example. I don't know if it's ever been challenged, but he does claim all output of Alpha is copyrighted to him.
AlanYx 7y ago
>Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically generated music isn't copyrightable. As far as I can tell, that's not always true. For now it seems largely context-specific, provided that a human wrote the software generating the output. There's a relatively well-known legal case of someone writing numerological software to generate eschatological texts, where the texts themselves were found to be copyrightable. The USPTO is currently soliciting comments on whether and under what circumstances AI-generated outputs should be copyrightable [1]. [1]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-10-30/pdf/2019-23638.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-10-30/pdf/2019-2...
exabrial 7y ago
Many game engine studios are claiming the graphic image outputs of their game engines are copyrighted. Most definitely, they are computer generated. What about CGI in movie scenes? Also algorithmically generated.
- dahfizz 7y ago
  The "creative" aspect is what's important. Designing the sprites, backgrounds, art styles, etc of a videogames is creative. It's harder to argue that brute force generating every single possible sequence of musical notes is creative.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    I guess you can make the argument that coding up the solution that does the generating of the music is the creative part here, just as with games where the creative process is creating the environment for example. I guess music that is made by programming is just as copyrightable as "normal" music. With Ableton/Max Live and similar, programming and music production is getting closer and closer to each other anyways.
    - jerf 7y ago
      "I guess you can make the argument that coding up the solution that does the generating of the music is the creative part here" They unambiguously have a copyright to whatever software they wrote to create this output. You do not in general get copyright to the output of software, though. (You may in specific. I'm not getting too detailed here. But you definitely do not in general.)
    - gmiller123456 7y ago
      What is or isn't "significantly creative" will ultimately be left for a jury to decide. Even though the code might have involved significantly creative elements, that does not automatically imply that the program's output also includes significantly creative elements. A list of all possible permutations of anything isn't creative, regardless of how it was generated.
alasdair_ 7y ago
If he just remembered to take a photograph of the photograph and only share that version, he’d have been all set :)
exabrial 7y ago
What about syth arpeggiators? Essentially it allows you to push one key on a keyboard and the computer plays notes and chords according to an algorithmic sequence. These are used heavily in pop and EDM music.
- scoot 7y ago
  It seems pretty clear that creative input is required: https://youtu.be/vnOXHUK9LK0?t=487 https://youtu.be/vnOXHUK9LK0?t=487
jrockway 7y ago
I think the sticky bit comes when someone composes one of these songs. They might have put creative work into it, but the computer program put the song on the Internet first. So who owns it? I think where we're going here is that mere melodies are no longer copyrightable. I also think that was the point, because there was some high profile lawsuit not too long ago where some popular musician sued another for copyright infringement on a centuries old melody. And won.
boublepop 7y ago
> In this specific case, it was a computer that created the music, not a human. You don’t really get any music made by humans these days, the sound of hitting them against each other just isn’t that popular. So we get music made by guitars, pianos, trumpets ect. But of cause all that music is still “made by humans using those instruments” just like this was made by a human using a computer.

itronitron 7y ago

But can a person acquire copyright on a melody they wrote that was also previously algorithmically generated?

seandougall 7y ago
You can generally only copyright the parts you change. Sort of like how Disney can copyright their version of Rapunzel, but they don’t own the fairy tale. (Edit: that’s assuming you’re asking about a derivative work, which I may have misunderstood)
- itronitron 7y ago
  I guess my question is more focused on whether a person can copyright something they created that was created by something else previously. So, if a musician creates a melody and then later finds that same melody was previously recorded on an album from the 1990's can they still copyright their melody? Does it matter whether the 1990's recording was machine-generated melodies or human-generated ones?
  - singron 7y ago
    This is discussed in the video somewhat. Copyright allows parallel invention. E.g. 2 people can copyright the same thing as long as neither one copied the other. In the video, they claim this is usually difficult to prove in court if the first work had at least moderate notoriety before the second was produced.

munificent 7y ago

On the other hand, most other photos are copyright by the person who took the photo. However, in those cases, it was a camera that took the photo, not a human. The camera contained a digital computer that executed code (not even written by the photographer in this case!) in order to produce a series of values stored on digital media. All the human did was push a button to tell it to go. There is also a long history of generative art and as far as I know, the author of the code retains full copyright to the works produced by the program.

gmiller123456 7y ago
I think you were trying to be a bit disingenuous, but that is actually true. Just because a human pressed a button on a camera does not mean the image is copyrightable. Example case [1] 1: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/18-13233/18-13233-2019-05-01.html https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca11/1...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
vanniv 7y ago
Generally, the human applies creativity in choosing the location, angle, exposure settings, and timing of "pressing the button"

bdowling 7y ago

Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the arrangement of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., Feist v. Rural, U.S. 1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that listed names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... [1] http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usrep499340.pdf http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep499/usrep499340/usr... Regarding David Slater's "Monkey Selfies", as far as I can tell, no court decided the question of whether the photo was copyrightable or whether the copyright belonged to Slater, only that it could not belong to the monkey.

gmiller123456 7y ago
Slater never filed a suit against anyone, so no court ever ruled on it. But he did request it removed from Wikimedia, and lots of experts weighed in. The WikiPedia page has summaries and links to lots of sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
SilasX 7y ago
>Lists of facts, where there is no creativity or originality in the arrangement of those facts, are not copyrightable. (See, e.g., Feist v. Rural, U.S. 1991 [0][1] (which found that a telephone directory "white pages" that listed names and phone numbers alphabetically was not copyrightable). Was there a reason you mentioned this? I don't see the relevance to the surrounding discussion.
- bdowling 7y ago
  A listing of all the possible melodies of a certain length is a list of facts. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    In don’t think anyone mentioned a listing of all possible melodies either, and if you think something they did mention is functionally equivalent, it would help if you made that explicit. Algorithmically generated music is not such a list, and does not involve publishing such a list, as no one would want that. They typically involve a lot of selection and choices by the author. They’re only algorithm-generated on the sense that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was “brush-generated”.

blackearl 7y ago

What if you record a robot playing the notes on a piano?

inetknght 7y ago
Better question: what if a robot records itself playing the notes on a piano?

wefarrell 7y ago

"Monkey Selfie" is not a good analogy for algorithmically generated music. A better analogy would be satellite images, which of course are copyrightable.

kragen 7y ago
I think it's crystal clear under US copyright law that on-nadir satellite images are not copyrightable; the elements of creative expression that normally give copyrightability to a photograph (composition, lighting, framing, choice of angle) are entirely absent. Feist, Hearn, and Bridgeman seem to provide a clear-cut answer in such cases. What jurisprudence are you thinking of?
- wefarrell 7y ago
  Here are some sources that say they are copyrightable: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=njilb https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten... https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 Any GIS tool with satellite images (Google earth/maps, Bing maps, etc...) will show a copyright logo on the screen specific to the satellite images.
  - kragen 7y ago
    From your second link https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1320&context=njilb https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten..., which is a law review article, not precedent or statute: "Copyright protection is thus unavailable to unenhanced data. ... Predictably, EOSAT does not attempt to copyright unenhanced Landsat data." However, it's from 1990, prior to Feist (1991) and Bridgeman (1999), though not Hearn (1987). Even so, it doesn't attempt to make the argument that you're making, that raw satellite photos themselves are subject to copyright: "The statutory definition of a copyright certainly suggests that...data which has been enhanced through human creativity qualifies for protection." (Emphasis mine.) Law review articles, like legal briefs, are primarily attempts to advocate a certain point of view by presenting the best available arguments for it, in the hopes of influencing future jurisprudence or legislation. The positions they advocate are thus not reliable guides to reality, although they are more persuasive to the extent that their arguments are based on reality and thus not easily demolished. The other two https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1027166 and https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1292646 not only aren't jurisprudence, they aren't even law review articles, nor do they reference any jurisprudence or make any legal arguments. Also, they are both from Singapore. Actually they are papers about steganography, not copyright. Did you... did you just google [satellite image copyright] and paste the first few links you saw without reading them, hoping you could waste a bunch of my time for a minimal amount of effort on your part?

jordigh 7y ago

Some people have been claiming copyright on algorithmic outputs. Wolfram is one such prominent example. I don't know if it's ever been challenged, but he does claim all output of Alpha is copyrighted to him.

AlanYx 7y ago

>Not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that purely algorithmically generated music isn't copyrightable. As far as I can tell, that's not always true. For now it seems largely context-specific, provided that a human wrote the software generating the output. There's a relatively well-known legal case of someone writing numerological software to generate eschatological texts, where the texts themselves were found to be copyrightable. The USPTO is currently soliciting comments on whether and under what circumstances AI-generated outputs should be copyrightable [1]. [1]: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-10-30/pdf/2019-23638.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2019-10-30/pdf/2019-2...

exabrial 7y ago

Many game engine studios are claiming the graphic image outputs of their game engines are copyrighted. Most definitely, they are computer generated. What about CGI in movie scenes? Also algorithmically generated.

dahfizz 7y ago
The "creative" aspect is what's important. Designing the sprites, backgrounds, art styles, etc of a videogames is creative. It's harder to argue that brute force generating every single possible sequence of musical notes is creative.
- capableweb 7y ago
  I guess you can make the argument that coding up the solution that does the generating of the music is the creative part here, just as with games where the creative process is creating the environment for example. I guess music that is made by programming is just as copyrightable as "normal" music. With Ableton/Max Live and similar, programming and music production is getting closer and closer to each other anyways.
  - jerf 7y ago
    "I guess you can make the argument that coding up the solution that does the generating of the music is the creative part here" They unambiguously have a copyright to whatever software they wrote to create this output. You do not in general get copyright to the output of software, though. (You may in specific. I'm not getting too detailed here. But you definitely do not in general.)
  - gmiller123456 7y ago
    What is or isn't "significantly creative" will ultimately be left for a jury to decide. Even though the code might have involved significantly creative elements, that does not automatically imply that the program's output also includes significantly creative elements. A list of all possible permutations of anything isn't creative, regardless of how it was generated.

alasdair_ 7y ago

If he just remembered to take a photograph of the photograph and only share that version, he’d have been all set :)

exabrial 7y ago

What about syth arpeggiators? Essentially it allows you to push one key on a keyboard and the computer plays notes and chords according to an algorithmic sequence. These are used heavily in pop and EDM music.

scoot 7y ago
It seems pretty clear that creative input is required: https://youtu.be/vnOXHUK9LK0?t=487 https://youtu.be/vnOXHUK9LK0?t=487

jrockway 7y ago

I think the sticky bit comes when someone composes one of these songs. They might have put creative work into it, but the computer program put the song on the Internet first. So who owns it? I think where we're going here is that mere melodies are no longer copyrightable. I also think that was the point, because there was some high profile lawsuit not too long ago where some popular musician sued another for copyright infringement on a centuries old melody. And won.

boublepop 7y ago

> In this specific case, it was a computer that created the music, not a human. You don’t really get any music made by humans these days, the sound of hitting them against each other just isn’t that popular. So we get music made by guitars, pianos, trumpets ect. But of cause all that music is still “made by humans using those instruments” just like this was made by a human using a computer.