10 ms·

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of

It's definitely satire, but it's satire in the face of comical law. That's the point. If copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale, and in a limited number of bars, then this is a completely valid argument against such a weak argument. The reality is that many number one songs can be tonally compared to many classical pieces, or even pieces from the last 40 years. The current state of music copyright law is an absolute joke, and deserves to be "disrupted" (destroyed).

goto11 7y ago
So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.
- Lewton 7y ago
  “You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.” Yes that’s actually the entire point of this A lot of commenters seem to be missing the fact that this is a response to ridiculous arguments being used in winning court cases
- fphhotchips 7y ago
  Yes, of course it means that. I might randomly generate data to test with. Doesn't mean it's private and needs to be treated as such if I accidentally and unknowingly stumble across real info.
  - simonh 7y ago
    You could be helpful and provide a means for people to request their accidentally reproduced private data be redacted. See example below[0]. [0]https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155 https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Nasrudith 7y ago
      Ironically that would be a way to disclose your very real data by omission.
      - apetresc 7y ago
        That's the joke.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Ha! It does not work however, as a person's sexual preference is a fact, and a statement that either guesses or spits out all recognized variants is not a source of factual information -- no-one is any the wiser afterwards than before.
  - jameshart 7y ago
    On the other hand if you offered it up as a fact with reckless disregard for its truthfulness... Again we see programmers trying to understand the law in terms of ‘how can a piece of data be illegal?’ while the law is quite happily focusing on making specific actions illegal. ‘You can’t arrest me, gold bars aren’t illegal!’ ‘Yes, but carrying them out of the federal reserve vault without permission is.’
    - ajuc 7y ago
      "I invented this later but independently" isn't a valid defense, even if you can prove it. So it's not actions (like copying or plagiarism) that is prohibited, it's the result. That's the problem with IP law. In effect you give people monopoly on numbers. When the numbers are big nobody is bothered by this, because chance of arriving at the exact same one is effectively zero. But for songs the numbers are pretty small (depending on the encoding used to compare the songs), and the absurdity is evident.
      - paulddraper 7y ago
        s/song/music/ i.e. sans lyrics
      - wool_gather 7y ago
        That's not correct in the case of copyright. Independent invention can be used as a defense to a copyright infringement claim. > Generally, a plaintiff proves copying through circumstantial evidence, showing that the defendant had access to the copyrighted work [...] > > [...] unlike in patent law, if a defendant independently creates the substantially similar work, he is not liable to the copyright holder. https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-willful-infringement-standard-a-comparison.html https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-wil...
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  The garbage data makes all of the difference. Said accidental generation would make it legal as the only way to pick out the data is to know it already. Otherwise what separates your real name from "Name: Seymoure Butts Sexual Orientation: Mayonnaise". The fact there is no garbage data at all shows that they are doing judgement on a nakedly wrong level in music - even by the standards of copyright. Selling "Harry Potter but with the capitalization inverted" to dodge book copyright nor even "this key and this very long block of data which happen to decrypt to the complete works of JK Rowling, don't decrypt because that would be infringement wink wink nudge nudge".
  - akhosravian 7y ago
    How about selling grape juice with a warning on how to not ferment it to avoid prohibition laws? https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s-wine-industry-during-prohibition/ https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
  - goto11 7y ago
    I would presume to vast majority of the automatically generate music is basically garbage? If we say that music (and really any information) is just numbers which can be enumerated automatically, then surely the creative action is finding and picking a number which is actual interesting out of the infinite sea of random garbage. My point is that framing music as "just numbers" does not disprove that producing a song is a unique creative work. There may be valid arguments against copyright, but this one isn't.
- tingletech 7y ago
  https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info
- sandov 7y ago
  The argument simply exposes the ridiculousness of the law.
- LMYahooTFY 7y ago
  This is a complete non sequitur. Your example is barely plausible, much less demonstrable. The connection between "original works" using an extremely limited set of notes, and your right to privacy using some theoretical predictive algorithm is not at all obvious.
  - goto11 7y ago
    I agree. I wanted to point out the absurdity of the argument used in the article. The argument is that music is just numbers and numbers are not copyrightable. But any kind of information is "just numbers" which can be enumerated given enough time.
- jerf 7y ago
  This actually reveals an important truth about the nature of information: Information is often better understood as exclusionary, rather than somehow "creative". If I have a "thing", you don't know what color it is. If I know tell you it is "red", you still don't know the exact shade, but I have excluded a lot of possibilities. How informative my statement is depends on how much is excluded. If I name an exact Pantone color, I am being much more informative. In some sense, looking at information as being exclusionary and as being inclusive are the same thing, but there's a lot of ways in which the former actually makes more sense as a thought framework. And in this particular context we can see how that plays out... a list of all possible melodies of a given nature actually has very little information in it, because it doesn't exclude enough. It may superficially seem to our human senses that a lot of stuff has been included/constructed, but in reality, the 'list of every possible melody' is a vapor. There's not actually anything there. It is the act of exclusion of possibilities that leads to interesting information. Such information as this list has is contained in its specification of what a "melody" is. Counterintuitively (to a lot of people's understanding), if they widened the specifications, while they would end up with a bigger list they'd end up with less information in the result. The act of creating a song isn't a matter of creating the possibilities from the raw nothingness, it's a matter of carving them out of the exponentially-large space of possibilities and finding something there useful. The exponentially-large space is so large that it is very easy to not see it that way, because, I mean, it's huge. It doesn't feel like "removing" possibilities the way carving a 3D stone does ("I remove everything that doesn't look like my desired statue"), because the exponential space is so inexpressibly larger, and we need fundamentally different tools to address such a space, but in the end, it's the same thing. While this isn't what the law was written for necessarily, the "creativity" requirement here could be very easily pressed into service here. They've expressed very little creativity/exclusion on this list and it would be easy to argue it falls far below the threshold necessary for copyright. As a literary criticism of the system, it is successful and thought provoking... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely.
  - nybble41 7y ago
    > ... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely. The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all—so the mere fact that two songs use the same melody is not sufficient to show that one is a copy of the other. The set of melodies that are compatible with human ascetics is even smaller. They don't actually need these auto-generated melodies to qualify for copyright for the project to succeed. It works equally well if similarity in melody is not considered sufficient evidence of copyright infringement. Even just having the database around so that one can say that they copied the melody from here rather than from some other source might be enough. After all, unlike patents, independently producing something similar to a copyrighted work is not infringement; you have to have actually copied from the other work. If you're a musician perhaps you should listen to a few randomly-selected melodies from this program each day. Maybe it will spark something, but even if it doesn't it will at least make it harder to argue that whatever melody you come up with could only have been "subconsciously copied" from some other composer's song you may have heard decades ago.
paulddraper 7y ago
> copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet! The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.
- ajuc 7y ago
  The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    > just 12^100 At the risk of getting stuck in a loop: "No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441366
    - ajuc 7y ago
      I was overestimating, I even mentioned it. > and if you only care about melody it's overestimation And they did it that way because courts don't worry about the exact tempo, meter and rhythm when ruling on plagiarism. There was a guy trying to copyright A CHORD :)
      - paulddraper 7y ago
        > exact tempo, meter and rhythm That much is true. > a guy trying to copyright A CHORD IIRC he failed miserably. A better example would be the (until recently) coprighted song "Happy Birthday." [1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday-copyright-suit-settled-n477671 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...
bougiefever 7y ago
For example, there are a number of songs that include a rendition of Tom's Diner within a larger melody. Also popular to add to a song is the Arabian riff melody (which is so old it's not copyrightable, but you get my point) I don't know of any law suits around Tom's Diner song, but this is an example of the types of ridiculous lawsuits out there over copyright.

goto11 7y ago

So I can write a program which can generate your name and your sexual preference (among a lot of garbage data). Does that mean this can no longer be considered private information subject to privacy laws? You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.

Lewton 7y ago
“You can use a ridiculous argument for many things.” Yes that’s actually the entire point of this A lot of commenters seem to be missing the fact that this is a response to ridiculous arguments being used in winning court cases
fphhotchips 7y ago
Yes, of course it means that. I might randomly generate data to test with. Doesn't mean it's private and needs to be treated as such if I accidentally and unknowingly stumble across real info.
- simonh 7y ago
  You could be helpful and provide a means for people to request their accidentally reproduced private data be redacted. See example below[0]. [0]https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155 https://github.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/pull/155
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Ironically that would be a way to disclose your very real data by omission.
    - apetresc 7y ago
      That's the joke.
mannykannot 7y ago
Ha! It does not work however, as a person's sexual preference is a fact, and a statement that either guesses or spits out all recognized variants is not a source of factual information -- no-one is any the wiser afterwards than before.
- jameshart 7y ago
  On the other hand if you offered it up as a fact with reckless disregard for its truthfulness... Again we see programmers trying to understand the law in terms of ‘how can a piece of data be illegal?’ while the law is quite happily focusing on making specific actions illegal. ‘You can’t arrest me, gold bars aren’t illegal!’ ‘Yes, but carrying them out of the federal reserve vault without permission is.’
  - ajuc 7y ago
    "I invented this later but independently" isn't a valid defense, even if you can prove it. So it's not actions (like copying or plagiarism) that is prohibited, it's the result. That's the problem with IP law. In effect you give people monopoly on numbers. When the numbers are big nobody is bothered by this, because chance of arriving at the exact same one is effectively zero. But for songs the numbers are pretty small (depending on the encoding used to compare the songs), and the absurdity is evident.
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      s/song/music/ i.e. sans lyrics
    - wool_gather 7y ago
      That's not correct in the case of copyright. Independent invention can be used as a defense to a copyright infringement claim. > Generally, a plaintiff proves copying through circumstantial evidence, showing that the defendant had access to the copyrighted work [...] > > [...] unlike in patent law, if a defendant independently creates the substantially similar work, he is not liable to the copyright holder. https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-willful-infringement-standard-a-comparison.html https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/copying-copyright-s-wil...
Nasrudith 7y ago
The garbage data makes all of the difference. Said accidental generation would make it legal as the only way to pick out the data is to know it already. Otherwise what separates your real name from "Name: Seymoure Butts Sexual Orientation: Mayonnaise". The fact there is no garbage data at all shows that they are doing judgement on a nakedly wrong level in music - even by the standards of copyright. Selling "Harry Potter but with the capitalization inverted" to dodge book copyright nor even "this key and this very long block of data which happen to decrypt to the complete works of JK Rowling, don't decrypt because that would be infringement wink wink nudge nudge".
- akhosravian 7y ago
  How about selling grape juice with a warning on how to not ferment it to avoid prohibition laws? https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s-wine-industry-during-prohibition/ https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...
- goto11 7y ago
  I would presume to vast majority of the automatically generate music is basically garbage? If we say that music (and really any information) is just numbers which can be enumerated automatically, then surely the creative action is finding and picking a number which is actual interesting out of the infinite sea of random garbage. My point is that framing music as "just numbers" does not disprove that producing a song is a unique creative work. There may be valid arguments against copyright, but this one isn't.
tingletech 7y ago
https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info
sandov 7y ago
The argument simply exposes the ridiculousness of the law.
LMYahooTFY 7y ago
This is a complete non sequitur. Your example is barely plausible, much less demonstrable. The connection between "original works" using an extremely limited set of notes, and your right to privacy using some theoretical predictive algorithm is not at all obvious.
- goto11 7y ago
  I agree. I wanted to point out the absurdity of the argument used in the article. The argument is that music is just numbers and numbers are not copyrightable. But any kind of information is "just numbers" which can be enumerated given enough time.
jerf 7y ago
This actually reveals an important truth about the nature of information: Information is often better understood as exclusionary, rather than somehow "creative". If I have a "thing", you don't know what color it is. If I know tell you it is "red", you still don't know the exact shade, but I have excluded a lot of possibilities. How informative my statement is depends on how much is excluded. If I name an exact Pantone color, I am being much more informative. In some sense, looking at information as being exclusionary and as being inclusive are the same thing, but there's a lot of ways in which the former actually makes more sense as a thought framework. And in this particular context we can see how that plays out... a list of all possible melodies of a given nature actually has very little information in it, because it doesn't exclude enough. It may superficially seem to our human senses that a lot of stuff has been included/constructed, but in reality, the 'list of every possible melody' is a vapor. There's not actually anything there. It is the act of exclusion of possibilities that leads to interesting information. Such information as this list has is contained in its specification of what a "melody" is. Counterintuitively (to a lot of people's understanding), if they widened the specifications, while they would end up with a bigger list they'd end up with less information in the result. The act of creating a song isn't a matter of creating the possibilities from the raw nothingness, it's a matter of carving them out of the exponentially-large space of possibilities and finding something there useful. The exponentially-large space is so large that it is very easy to not see it that way, because, I mean, it's huge. It doesn't feel like "removing" possibilities the way carving a 3D stone does ("I remove everything that doesn't look like my desired statue"), because the exponential space is so inexpressibly larger, and we need fundamentally different tools to address such a space, but in the end, it's the same thing. While this isn't what the law was written for necessarily, the "creativity" requirement here could be very easily pressed into service here. They've expressed very little creativity/exclusion on this list and it would be easy to argue it falls far below the threshold necessary for copyright. As a literary criticism of the system, it is successful and thought provoking... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely.
- nybble41 7y ago
  > ... as a legal criticism of the system it would fail completely. The legal criticism would be that there just aren't that many unique melodies—as demonstrated by the fact that they were able to enumerate them all—so the mere fact that two songs use the same melody is not sufficient to show that one is a copy of the other. The set of melodies that are compatible with human ascetics is even smaller. They don't actually need these auto-generated melodies to qualify for copyright for the project to succeed. It works equally well if similarity in melody is not considered sufficient evidence of copyright infringement. Even just having the database around so that one can say that they copied the melody from here rather than from some other source might be enough. After all, unlike patents, independently producing something similar to a copyrighted work is not infringement; you have to have actually copied from the other work. If you're a musician perhaps you should listen to a few randomly-selected melodies from this program each day. Maybe it will spark something, but even if it doesn't it will at least make it harder to argue that whatever melody you come up with could only have been "subconsciously copied" from some other composer's song you may have heard decades ago.

paulddraper 7y ago

> copyright lawyers want to argue originality based on an arrangement of notes in a 12 tone scale Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet! The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.

ajuc 7y ago
The whole concept of IP is absurd, and there are many absurd consequences you can derive from it. But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > just 12^100 At the risk of getting stuck in a loop: "No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441366
  - ajuc 7y ago
    I was overestimating, I even mentioned it. > and if you only care about melody it's overestimation And they did it that way because courts don't worry about the exact tempo, meter and rhythm when ruling on plagiarism. There was a guy trying to copyright A CHORD :)
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      > exact tempo, meter and rhythm That much is true. > a guy trying to copyright A CHORD IIRC he failed miserably. A better example would be the (until recently) coprighted song "Happy Birthday." [1] [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthday-copyright-suit-settled-n477671 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...

bougiefever 7y ago

For example, there are a number of songs that include a rendition of Tom's Diner within a larger melody. Also popular to add to a song is the Arabian riff melody (which is so old it's not copyrightable, but you get my point) I don't know of any law suits around Tom's Diner song, but this is an example of the types of ridiculous lawsuits out there over copyright.