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You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a c

You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a copyrightable melody.

paulddraper 7y ago
It's not four, but eleven letters and two spaces was sufficient for Universal to win against Kamar in the "ET phone home" copyright lawsuit
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".
  - jerf 7y ago
    Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment, but it doesn't break the system as a whole. In the latter case, there's also no real risk of accidentally stomping on that. The claim in this particular case is that they really have generated the entire possible melody space. Legally I think it's likely to fail on multiple levels if it is ever challenged, but part of the point is that some of those failures should also be applied to some real copyright suits that have been won. (It is somewhat ironic that the music industry continues to be so upset about copyright even as they appear to be converging on The One True Pop Song at speed. Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less.)
    - derefr 7y ago
      > Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrighted, unable to be used without license.
      - jerf 7y ago
        Yeah, it's more a thought experiment you get in copyright class. You are right, legally the matter is fairly settled.
      - salawat 7y ago
        >Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. I would question any legal professional's authoritative standing to even advise on copyright of a work of music if they miscategorize a recording of ambient sound as a performance of a musical scoring consisting entirely of silence. The copyright doesn't apply to the ambient sound, but to the long quiessence of an artist at their instrument. It demonstrates a complete blindness of the negative space of music, and a positivistic bias that has no place being enshrined in our legal system.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less. It's not just the music industry. The whole economy starts to feel like overfitting the profit function.
    - salawat 7y ago
      >It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever you want, and you'll still be publically performing 4'33". The rather humorous outcome, if one asks me, is that anyone who writes in 4 beats of silemce into a score should be violating copyright if we're going to be consistent.
- bdowling 7y ago
  > “ET phone home” Usually short phrases aren’t supposed to be protectable under copyright. However, when a defendant blatantly appropriates a well-known literary phrase for a commercial purpose like selling unlicensed merchandise, courts may make an exception.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    Yep. One of the arguments no sane person should countenance is that Katy Perry's songwriters happened to use a four note descending synth arpeggio in an intentional attempt to cash in on the fact a four note descending arpeggio in a different key was a motif used on one of the sixteen tracks of an album which hit number five in the Gospel Charts four years earlier. For similar reasons, Universal isn't going after most of the 3.8m websites using the phrase 'phone home', and you're probably OK using three stripes in artwork unless you're drawing them on the shoulders of sportswear or sides of shoes to make it look like Adidas. [there actually are musicians that specialise in recording backing tracks intended to resemble a particular popular recording which aren't that recording for use in commercial products, but they tend not to get sued...]
  - derefr 7y ago
    Wouldn’t that be considered something more like an implicitly-created trademark? It’s essentially the equivalent of a company motto for the the movie’s SPV company.
  - lmkg 7y ago
    Copyright law considers the importance of a sample to the work as a whole, in addition to just the size. Any arbitrary three-word phrase from the middle of a script is probably not copyright infringement. The most memorable line from the entire movie probably is. Related: The Supreme Court ruled that excerpting a single paragraph from a 454-page book can be copyright infringement. The book was Gerald Ford's memoirs, the one paragraph was his reasoning for pardoning Nixon. The Court's reasoning was more-or-less that nobody cared about anything else Ford did, so excerpting the one paragraph was as good as giving the whole book away for free.
    - 7y ago
SilasX 7y ago
Exactly! What they're doing would otherwise seem pointless, but given how far off the rails the courts went on that lawsuit, copyright jurisprudence needs this kind of sanity check, because courts clearly aren't using enough criteria to call a melody "copied".

You're not gonna get away with copyrighting a 4-letter sequence, but the recent Katy Perry vs Flame lawsuit established that 4 notes is all it takes to have a copyrightable melody.

paulddraper 7y ago

It's not four, but eleven letters and two spaces was sufficient for Universal to win against Kamar in the "ET phone home" copyright lawsuit

logfromblammo 7y ago
I would note that 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence is copyrighted by John Cage as " 4'33" ", and a single chord sustained for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence, is copyrighted by Yves Klein as "The Monotone-Silence Symphony".
- jerf 7y ago
  Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment, but it doesn't break the system as a whole. In the latter case, there's also no real risk of accidentally stomping on that. The claim in this particular case is that they really have generated the entire possible melody space. Legally I think it's likely to fail on multiple levels if it is ever challenged, but part of the point is that some of those failures should also be applied to some real copyright suits that have been won. (It is somewhat ironic that the music industry continues to be so upset about copyright even as they appear to be converging on The One True Pop Song at speed. Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less.)
  - derefr 7y ago
    > Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance context may still be an interesting thought experiment Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrighted, unable to be used without license.
    - jerf 7y ago
      Yeah, it's more a thought experiment you get in copyright class. You are right, legally the matter is fairly settled.
    - salawat 7y ago
      >Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. I would question any legal professional's authoritative standing to even advise on copyright of a work of music if they miscategorize a recording of ambient sound as a performance of a musical scoring consisting entirely of silence. The copyright doesn't apply to the ambient sound, but to the long quiessence of an artist at their instrument. It demonstrates a complete blindness of the negative space of music, and a positivistic bias that has no place being enshrined in our legal system.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less. It's not just the music industry. The whole economy starts to feel like overfitting the profit function.
  - salawat 7y ago
    >It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever you want, and you'll still be publically performing 4'33". The rather humorous outcome, if one asks me, is that anyone who writes in 4 beats of silemce into a score should be violating copyright if we're going to be consistent.
bdowling 7y ago
> “ET phone home” Usually short phrases aren’t supposed to be protectable under copyright. However, when a defendant blatantly appropriates a well-known literary phrase for a commercial purpose like selling unlicensed merchandise, courts may make an exception.
- notahacker 7y ago
  Yep. One of the arguments no sane person should countenance is that Katy Perry's songwriters happened to use a four note descending synth arpeggio in an intentional attempt to cash in on the fact a four note descending arpeggio in a different key was a motif used on one of the sixteen tracks of an album which hit number five in the Gospel Charts four years earlier. For similar reasons, Universal isn't going after most of the 3.8m websites using the phrase 'phone home', and you're probably OK using three stripes in artwork unless you're drawing them on the shoulders of sportswear or sides of shoes to make it look like Adidas. [there actually are musicians that specialise in recording backing tracks intended to resemble a particular popular recording which aren't that recording for use in commercial products, but they tend not to get sued...]
- derefr 7y ago
  Wouldn’t that be considered something more like an implicitly-created trademark? It’s essentially the equivalent of a company motto for the the movie’s SPV company.
- lmkg 7y ago
  Copyright law considers the importance of a sample to the work as a whole, in addition to just the size. Any arbitrary three-word phrase from the middle of a script is probably not copyright infringement. The most memorable line from the entire movie probably is. Related: The Supreme Court ruled that excerpting a single paragraph from a 454-page book can be copyright infringement. The book was Gerald Ford's memoirs, the one paragraph was his reasoning for pardoning Nixon. The Court's reasoning was more-or-less that nobody cared about anything else Ford did, so excerpting the one paragraph was as good as giving the whole book away for free.
  - 7y ago

SilasX 7y ago

Exactly! What they're doing would otherwise seem pointless, but given how far off the rails the courts went on that lawsuit, copyright jurisprudence needs this kind of sanity check, because courts clearly aren't using enough criteria to call a melody "copied".