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Tool to convert copyrighted music into fair use
- konstruction 5y agoHilarious :-)
- er4hn 5y agoFinally, Copilot for Music!
- laurent92 5y agoStrangely, a lookalike of a music hit is nothing like the original, and it’s worth analyzing! - Music is a vehicle for a common experience. Everyone knows the next notes of some Lady Gaga song. We feel like learning the lyrics will make us able to sing together if we were in a club, and share something with other clubbers. Any AI who would reproduce the voice and instruments would still not make you feel like you are sharing a common moment with the rest of the auditors, - Hits are hits because we hear them a thousand times. It’s been proven that people don’t necessarily like it the first time. It’s the familiarity with the song which make us like it (or hate it when we’ve heard to too much). - Even worse: We like some songs even more because we love the author. Be it because they are politically involved, have a cute face, has a nice life story, or seem to hide answers to life in the lyrics of their work - But an AI producing the same exact notes wouldn’t trigger similar affection from us. It’s like hearing our kid singing: Very cute, but we wouldn’t like the same song by another kid. Audiences have a genuine emotional attachment to the authors. It’s especially visible since the MCM revolution: Before MCM, music mattered; Now the image matters way more, bands have a face, a graphic style, a story to tell - and music could be as crap as possible, if we like the band it can still have success. MCM changed music forever, proving that AI can’t replace that feeling. Can it?
- imwillofficial 5y agoI hear a lot of stated assumptions on how certain things trigger emotional investment and other don’t. If you knew how manufactured the music industry was, and how nothing of what you see of celebrities is true, it might as well be AI plucking our heart strings, because it isn’t “real” in the sense that I think you mean, authentic human connection over shared experience.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anderber 5y agoWhat are the criteria that this tool uses to determine something to be fair use?
- sumnole 5y agoIt's a joke ragging on Github Copilot, which suggests to its users code on github regardless of its copyright. The claim is that any code written with Copilot does not infringe since it's 'machine-generated code'. Github Copilot takes github code, learns it and then feeds it to users based on prompts but you can end up essentially copy and pasting an entire copyrighted snippet. This satire site takes your uploaded mp3, 'learns it' and hands you back the same mp3.
- anderber 5y agoAh, thank you for the explanation!
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoSo having tried it out the song sounds...exactly the same. So does this just make it that when it's played these detection systems can't pick it up since it's somewhat different? Or if I make a commercial product, include this version of the song, I can somehow afford lawyers to defend myself when the music industry sues me for using what sounds like the same song, just with the 1's and 0's ordered a little differently? Edit: was out of the loop on the joke...
- detaro 5y agoIt's a joke about GitHub Copilot.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- abetusk 5y agoI think that's the joke. It literally takes the exact same song unaltered but it says it's "using machine learning", "fair use" etc. to give the pretense of it being legitimate. This is most likely a commentary on GitHub co-pilot and how the authors of this joke think that GitHub co-pilot is violating copyright and does not fall under fair-use. I just confirmed the "processed" file has the same SHA256 sum as the original. EDIT: I incorrectly labelled at Google co-pilot instead of GitHub co-pilot. Fixed.
- barbecue_sauce 5y agoGithub Copilot.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- laurent92 5y agoThe code source is setTimeout(…, random()). I’d say, even if it takes long to build the neural network, it is very CPU efficient.
- sycren 5y agoBy uploading the licensed music in the first place, are we not breaching copyright law?
- Hamuko 5y agoObviously machine learning is fair use, so it supersedes copyright.
- laurent92 5y agoI sense a sleigh of bitterness in the programming community after Copilot ;) It’s the rumbling sound of the imagination of a thousand people throwing the towel saying “What now”.
- Hamuko 5y agoYeah, why would anyone be bitter about a giant corporation creating a commercial code laundering machine that digests a massive amount of copyrighted code and spits out "clean" code free of all the burdens of its inputs?
- laurent92 5y agoThe same as million of people who unvoluntarily give their real-time GPS coordinate to Google so they can tell everyone where the jams are? The same as CC owners (everybody) whose data gets constantly harvested to produce models for Walmart? We benefit from wages for our programmer and AI skills in a way that is often used unethically by companies, it’s quite fair that we feel the heat. I don’t know, GitHub Copilot was an expected result (why would anyone propose to host most of civilization’s open source projects for free? SourceForge did worse with shipping malware into people’s binaries.) It is a bit disgusting, but we programmers have done it to the rest of the world.
- Hamuko 5y agoI am pretty sure that neither my GPS coordinate information or credit card details are copyrightable works. And I'm pretty sure I've done none of those things, so I don't really know where this "programmers are the scum of the earth" generalisation is coming from.
- wizzwizz4 5y agoWow. And it's entirely client-side, too! Impressive.
- steelbrain 5y agoIn case you don't get it, view the source :) It's just a bunch of a sleep(random()) and visual changes on viewport and you download the exact file you uploaded
- londons_explore 5y agoI tried to play the original and downloaded music a bunch of times to try to figure out any differences...
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe page code was written by co-pilot
- stavros 5y agoI suspect they train the network on a sample size of one and then ask it to generate something, or at least that's the idea. The project seems like a fairly obvious rag on Copilot.
- gavinray 5y agoDamn, I read this as "Tool, the band, is converting all of their copyrighted music into fair-use music." and got excited. But this is funny too I guess
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ChristianGeek 5y agoGreat way for the owner of the site to build up a library of free music!
- IceHegel 5y agoaudiophiles gotta try this! it makes the music soo much better
- speedgoose 5y agoHave you tried Github co-pilot? It's not going to copy paste the Linux source code, like Dungeon AI is not going to copy paste a Tolkien book.
- andersource 5y agoMost of the time, but it can, and I think that's the issue a lot of people have with it. https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
- zxzax 5y agoI don't understand why anyone has an issue with that. You know what else can copy and paste code all the time? Humans. But we have various ways of stopping employees who copy and paste code from stackoverflow and github without checking the license, so it's the same thing if you use one of these tools. There's nothing new I can see here to be upset about. This would be a lot more interesting if it showed the various GPT-3 experiments at generating music and used that as a point of comparison.
- paulgb 5y ago> But we have various ways of stopping employees who copy and paste code from stackoverflow and github without checking the license What would those be? I’ve worked at a number of organizations that were (rightfully) paranoid about accidentally incorporating GPL code, but even there I wasn’t aware of automated tooling to prevent it, it was only enforced through developer vigilance.
- zxzax 5y agoIf you actually want a paid service, there are plagiarism detectors like Fossa and Codequiry. Although in my opinion, code review should be enough to catch any "accidental" incidents of plagiarism, the differences in writing style should make it very obvious when the employee has copied something. That of course probably won't apply if you suspect the employee is intentionally changing it around to obfuscate the origin of the code, but it seems that wouldn't be the case if they were just committing the output straight from a neural net. But automated scanners probably won't be able to catch those well either -- the way to catch that would be to make them do pair programming a lot.
- nonbirithm 5y agoSo when are neural nets trained on images or text going to be confronted with the same copyright concerns? At the point that GitHub has forced the issue into the spotlight with Copilot I feel that it's only a matter of time before this reaches the courts. Nobody seemed to care about copyright at the time people were having fun creating AI dream collages or nonexistent anime girls from a model trained on the Danbooru imageset. In the latter case it's not clear that 100% of the original Pixiv and Twitter creators gave their consent to have their work rehosted on a different site in the first place, much less be involved in ML experiments. That data was from 2018. I'm almost tempted to believe that the people at GitHub knew this was going to blow up as much as it did as some kind of a challenge to the status quo of copyright and licensing, if only so that everyone would start talking about the issue. Why did the GitHub representative plainly state that Copilot was trained on all of GitHub's codebase without seeming to care about the pushback on Twitter and HN that was bound to happen as a result?
- jiminymcmoogley 5y agoby the time the dinosaurs that dictate our laws begin to care about it, copyright will no longer exist
- tgv 5y agoCongratulations. That's got to be a 100% accurate algorithm.
- jjcon 5y agoWhen did the HN crowd become so defensive of copyright? I understand the concerns on copilot but it’s kinda weirding me out.
- PaulKeeble 5y agoBecause its my (and many of ours) code they have "learnt" from, stripped the license and are intending to sell on. When we listed code under MIT or GPL we meant those licenses, they weren't random and Microsoft just seems to be completely ignoring the reality of reproducing those works which are covered by those licenses, they are making code private and paid for that is open source. Not OK.
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoBoth the permissive and copyleft licenses are only enforcable through copyright law. I don't mind that copyright exists, I just wish it was better. Also there's a power difference between individuals violating the rights of a big company, and a big company violating the rights of many individuals. If Copilot isn't reined in, it feels like yet another case of "The laws only apply to poor people".
- aurelian15 5y agoAs weird as it may seem, you should not forget that free software licenses are built upon the fabric of copyright. Without copyright, free software could not exist in its current form. For GPL-like "copyleft" licenses, there would be no way to enforce that binary distributions of derived works are accompanied by their source code. Similarly, in the context of permissive BSD/MIT-style licenses, there would be no way to enforce attribution. So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.
- bobthebuilders 5y agoUsing ddos-guard, does this sell my info to Russia?
- imwillofficial 5y agoIsn’t that service run out of a bunker in Norway or something? I remember they were in the news for something recently.
- ev1 5y agothis is on a vm in canada, what?
- bni 5y agoIt's Machine Learning, so anything is OK really.
- sellyme 5y agoI've seen a lot of people ragging on Copilot for "copy+pasting" code - does anyone have links to cases where it has done this without the user intentionally trying to generate a specific (extremely famous) code snippet? I've seen tons of comments here and on Reddit that talk about multiple instances of entire functions being copied verbatim, but the only thing even remotely close to that I've seen is the fast inverse square root, so I must have missed a few tweets or something.
- meibo 5y agoIt only seems to if you give it no or very little "source" input, like an empty file with a comment that says "// X algorithm". There's been a lot of bikeshedding on this, but GitHub decidedly hasn't given enough information on how it works and what the training dataset is, and the fair use question definitely needs to be answered, maybe even in court - it's just a matter of time.
- Hamuko 5y ago>what the training dataset is All non-private repositories on GitHub.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y agoIs it though? I'd assume that too, but we don't really know, do we? I mean to ask, what have Microsoft stated that leads you to believe this? (Maybe there's a press release I missed?)
- lyxell 5y agoI remember that the guys behind The Pirate Bay actually made a service like this back in the days. You would submit a song and get a mashup back of cuts from other songs where each cut would be short enough to fall under fair use. I can't find any references to it online anymore though. Maybe someone else remembers what the service was called.
- codetrotter 5y agoReminds me of this other thing from years ago called “sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!” https://youtu.be/eRlhKaxcKpA https://youtu.be/eRlhKaxcKpA It splits music videos into small portions ahead of time and then later it reassembles them on the fly according to audio input.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y agoI remember when that came out, it blew my mind! Did anything public ever materialize from the project?
- rikkipitt 5y agoI don't remember the site, but it reminds me of the Girl Talk album called "All Day" – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Day_(Girl_Talk_album) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Day_(Girl_Talk_album). It was originally released as a free digital download. > Greg Gillis composed the album using overlapping samples of 372 songs by other artists. This article goes into it a bit more: "Girl Talk, Fair Use, and Three Hundred Twenty-Two Reasons for Copyright Reform" – https://jipel.law.nyu.edu/ledger-vol-1-no-1-4-pearl/ https://jipel.law.nyu.edu/ledger-vol-1-no-1-4-pearl/
- not2b 5y agoI was kinda hoping it would change the song enough to get it past Youtube's copyright filters, but apparently not.
- IshKebab 5y agoHow do you go to this much effort to make a point without even reading about how copyright and fair use works? There have been multiple comments on HN and Reddit explaining how it doesn't work like this.
- blooalien 5y agoProbably because it's not really all that much effort (nor money) to toss a simple satire page like this one up on the web. Easier now than it's ever been, honestly.
- hedora 5y agoOoh. They have a DARPA grant! Applying now.
- cjohansson 5y agoHilarious stuff
- amelius 5y agoNice try, but ... Co-pilot can be sued for copyright infringement in specific cases. Therefore it doesn't mean you can get away with copyright infringement if you copy Co-pilot's model.
- Zambyte 5y agoFrom the Copilot FAQ: > Who owns the code GitHub Copilot helps me write? > GitHub Copilot is a tool, like a compiler or a pen. The suggestions GitHub Copilot generates, and the code you write with its help, belong to you, and you are responsible for it. We recommend that you carefully test, review, and vet the code, as you would with any code you write yourself. > Do I need to credit GitHub Copilot for helping me write code? > No, the code you create with GitHub Copilot’s help belongs to you. While every friendly robot likes the occasional word of thanks, you are in no way obligated to credit GitHub Copilot. Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you. While you may be right, that contradicts what Microsoft has to say.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Co-pilot can be sued for copyright infringement in specific cases No, it can't; Copilot isn't a legal entity that can be sued. Also, “can be sued” proves very little. Any actual or potential legal person can be sued for anything. “Is actually legally liable” is what you need here, and it is at best speculative that Copilot ever creates actual legal liability.
- viraptor 5y agoI have some public code with non-free licenses on GitHub and I'm really hoping copilot can reproduce some of my functions without changes. If they do I'll see what they do about DMCA requests for those. But... still waiting for access.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> If they do I'll see what they do about DMCA requests for those. DMCA takedown requests apply to hosts of user-generated content, which MS/Github doesn't pretend to be with Copilot (instead, Copilot is a first-party work that MS has stated a copyright theory regarding), so DMCA requests are meaningless. What you need, if you feel MS is violating your copyright via Github, is a copyright demand letter backed by a willingness to pursue a lawsuit against Microsoft, who have already stated that there position is that Copilot is completely within the Fair Use exception to copyright.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Black101 5y agoHe should not have faked the machine learning, but I like the idea. (And I hope that copyright fail to exist, or at least gets adjusted to what it should be... aka, the effectiveness should be the same as patents (not forever and not easily extended))
- habibur 5y agoI remember Web Font Player before dynamic fonts became available. You could upload a copyrighted font. Say Microsoft or Apple's font. It will trace that font and generate your "Web Font" and then you could use it without any copyright issue as that's not the original font rather a machine learnt one. Guess fonts are still like this.
- Hamuko 5y agoIn the US, fonts (a computer program) are copyrightable but typefaces (design of letters, numbers and other symbols) are not. So you can basically just redraw your own Helvetica with no copyright issues.
- Kenji 5y agoI knew it was fake when it displayed progress bars for machine learning but my CPU fan didn't spin up. Nice try though ;)
- smoldesu 5y agoTheoretically, isn't a "functional" version of this program possible? Machine-learning aside, I have to wonder how precise platforms like ContentID are, and how easily they could be fooled by an algorithm designed to fool the system with near-imperceptible changes (eg. cutting out certain high-end freqnecies, dilating the speed of the track by very small amounts, etc.)
- justshowpost 5y agoIt presents genuinely black screen after «downloading» gauge, so I can confirm what its fair use indeed.
- CyberRabbi 5y agoThis is such an innovative product! Game changer. The music industry will never be the same
- terrycody 5y agoI input a non-english song and it turns out nothing changed right?! Did I miss sth?
- mrlonglong 5y agoGnarly website
- IndySun 5y agoContemptible humour, they know they could deliver ML soundalikes if they tried! Harumph!