6 ms·

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

by eweise 5y ago

ovi256 5y ago
This may be a consequence of copyright law being developed in Europe. The European musical tradition is mostly concerned with harmony, and less with rhythm. A musical culture focusing on harmony would be most of the African traditions.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  I think you meant to say that African traditions focus on rhythm, not harmony?
- gnulinux 5y ago
  Just a nitpick but blanket statements like this are highly misleading. "European" musical traditions are not concerned with rhythm any less than "African" traditions. European musical theory historically focused on harmony more so than rhythm which has the side-effect of vernacular developing more a robust vocabulary for harmony. The reason this distinction matters is because I think its important to understand that not only European musical traditions will have equivalent rhythmic complexity but also other musical traditions will have equivalent harmonic complexity. Just because we don't have a great model of other musical traditions' harmony, does not mean they lack harmony. And vice versa. E.g. during Baroque era although temporal information was rarely denoted on paper (any more than 3 time, 4 time, tempo etc) musicians performing these pieces had to express a certain understanding of rhythm. Pieces were never played like MIDI, they always had rhythmic nuances.
  - dotancohen 5y ago
    And this seems to be completely lost today. Go listen to the Furtwrangler recordings, then listen to any modern arrangement. The modern arrangements are so precise, as if a computer is reading the scores. But the 1940s recordings are so full of life and vigor, it sounds like a different piece. And it is so much fun to listen to, even if the recording quality is atrocious by today's standards. Karajan might have been the last of the conductors that I enjoy like listening to. His fifth changes pace but it feels so natural. The slow parts are drawn out were they need to be, but the fast parts just grab you and drag you along. There was no notation for that, it took interpretation. And he could get all the instruments to open the piece together. Even Berenbaum couldn't get his players to open the piece properly, at least not those that I could find on Youtube. Thought there is one young guy on Youtube who does a terrific job conducting, I should go find that.
- munk-a 5y ago
  This is especially relevant when it comes to timbre a musical quality that's extremely difficult to even record in staff and bar notation.
whiddershins 5y ago
It does, this description of what can be copyrighted is confused.
thebricksta 5y ago
It's a fun concept, and maybe will be useful in some weird edge case of a lawsuit, but no. Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of the sound design, groove, rhythms, chord progressions, melody or reduced melody, structure, and lyrics wind up giving a song the same "feel" as a prior song, and that's the basis of the copyright infringement. Then pseudoscientific experts come in and pick and choose common musical elements that both the songs share to attempt to justify the claim, oftentimes wrongfully taking credit for inventing genre-wide defining musical elements. Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1]. An AI generated song machine would have to nail a lot more elements than just the melody notes to properly stop music copyright cases. In my view, a more interesting project that might be more effective in defusing lawsuits would be to try to catalog all of the musical tropes that define genres, then attempting to detect how common they are in that genre. In an ideal world, maybe this would be able to drive a metric of how similar specific two songs are vs. picking any two songs in that genre at random. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA1QmZvSNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA1QmZvSNs
- woolion 5y ago
  >Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1] He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out there, his is very weak. >Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of... There is a very good reason: as he mentions, the chords diversity use in pop songwriting is typically so poor that based only on that, the amount of things considered plagiarism would thus be ridiculous. If the similarities affect almost all dimensions (style, arrangement, rhythm, melody, ...) to the point of being "essentially the same", then it's exactly what people would want the law to exist for.
  - thebricksta 5y ago
    > He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out there, his is very weak. I think Adam Neely did a good job explaining what infringement lawsuits mean in the context of popular music production. Whether or not you agree with the strength of his case on this particular lawsuit, well that's not quite the point I was trying to make here. Still, what do you consider to be a strong take on this case?
jerf 5y ago
It sounds like you're assuming that they actually have any copyright on this. They don't. It's not identical but see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 for some similar issue. And in general, you must be "creative" to have a copyright. You might have a "copyright" on the resulting file, but no court would ever dream of extending that to a claim of copyright on every melody. There is no way that the author was "creative" in any sort of proportion to the amount of material being putatively claimed. Normally one would expect for this to then start a big HN chain arguing the precise definition of "creativity per unit output" that is the threshold, but in addition to the fact you have to get a court to agree to your definition, bear in mind that this is quite literally exponentially little creative effort per output. The author has put in so little effort per output that they haven't even listened to their own "work" once, I'm sure! This is not the normal definition of a "creative work". The usual arguments will be based around a polynomial at most, and frankly usually linear amount of output per "creative input". Especially in light of the fact that the lifespan of a given "creative human being" isn't even "linear" so much as "constant". Given that this is only a very small amount of effort from being able to claim all combinations of notes ever, it's clear this is not a copyrightable work, excepting perhaps the literal output of the work but no more than that. (It's also not that much more work to order these things in entropy order, by analyzing songs and deriving some probability for note lengths and intervals, making it so that one could just start generating melodies and actually hit almost every useful melody in an even "smaller" work. Also not copyrightable.) So, basically, don't learn anything about copyright from this article.
- wincy 5y ago
  I mean, the game No Man’s Sky procedurally generates 18 quintillion planets but they hold a copyright on all of those planets, don’t they? They certainly haven’t explored all of the planets.
  - balls187 5y ago
    I'm assuming you mean the US, right? I was doing legal research on this, and funny enough there is an article that discusses this very issue: http://mttlr.org/2016/11/no-mans-skynet-copyright-in-procedurally-generated-programs/ http://mttlr.org/2016/11/no-mans-skynet-copyright-in-procedu...
kube-system 5y ago
Copyright does take into account the entire work. However, people will sometimes claim that a portion of their work is stolen. The idea here is to give someone a citation of it existing elsewhere as a defense to the above. Although this is a very experimental endeavor and some suspect it won’t be taken very seriously in an actual court, because the context in which it was created may undermine some of the creative requirements for qualification under copyright law.
swamp40 5y ago
What about the silence between notes? Copyrighted or no? Their Jingle Bells sounds horrible with no silent spaces.
- matja 5y ago
  To fully appreciate the silence between notes, you must experience the full orchestra version of John Cage's 4'33"

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

by eweise 5y ago

I'm surprised to learn that copyright doesn't take into account the length of notes, which to me is part of what makes melodies unique.

ovi256 5y ago

This may be a consequence of copyright law being developed in Europe. The European musical tradition is mostly concerned with harmony, and less with rhythm. A musical culture focusing on harmony would be most of the African traditions.

QuercusMax 5y ago
I think you meant to say that African traditions focus on rhythm, not harmony?
gnulinux 5y ago
Just a nitpick but blanket statements like this are highly misleading. "European" musical traditions are not concerned with rhythm any less than "African" traditions. European musical theory historically focused on harmony more so than rhythm which has the side-effect of vernacular developing more a robust vocabulary for harmony. The reason this distinction matters is because I think its important to understand that not only European musical traditions will have equivalent rhythmic complexity but also other musical traditions will have equivalent harmonic complexity. Just because we don't have a great model of other musical traditions' harmony, does not mean they lack harmony. And vice versa. E.g. during Baroque era although temporal information was rarely denoted on paper (any more than 3 time, 4 time, tempo etc) musicians performing these pieces had to express a certain understanding of rhythm. Pieces were never played like MIDI, they always had rhythmic nuances.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  And this seems to be completely lost today. Go listen to the Furtwrangler recordings, then listen to any modern arrangement. The modern arrangements are so precise, as if a computer is reading the scores. But the 1940s recordings are so full of life and vigor, it sounds like a different piece. And it is so much fun to listen to, even if the recording quality is atrocious by today's standards. Karajan might have been the last of the conductors that I enjoy like listening to. His fifth changes pace but it feels so natural. The slow parts are drawn out were they need to be, but the fast parts just grab you and drag you along. There was no notation for that, it took interpretation. And he could get all the instruments to open the piece together. Even Berenbaum couldn't get his players to open the piece properly, at least not those that I could find on Youtube. Thought there is one young guy on Youtube who does a terrific job conducting, I should go find that.
munk-a 5y ago
This is especially relevant when it comes to timbre a musical quality that's extremely difficult to even record in staff and bar notation.

whiddershins 5y ago

It does, this description of what can be copyrighted is confused.

thebricksta 5y ago

It's a fun concept, and maybe will be useful in some weird edge case of a lawsuit, but no. Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of the sound design, groove, rhythms, chord progressions, melody or reduced melody, structure, and lyrics wind up giving a song the same "feel" as a prior song, and that's the basis of the copyright infringement. Then pseudoscientific experts come in and pick and choose common musical elements that both the songs share to attempt to justify the claim, oftentimes wrongfully taking credit for inventing genre-wide defining musical elements. Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1]. An AI generated song machine would have to nail a lot more elements than just the melody notes to properly stop music copyright cases. In my view, a more interesting project that might be more effective in defusing lawsuits would be to try to catalog all of the musical tropes that define genres, then attempting to detect how common they are in that genre. In an ideal world, maybe this would be able to drive a metric of how similar specific two songs are vs. picking any two songs in that genre at random. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA1QmZvSNs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnA1QmZvSNs

woolion 5y ago
>Adam Neely did a good job touching on this in his recent analysis of the Dua Lipa Levitating lawsuit [1] He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out there, his is very weak. >Most recent music infringement lawsuits seem to argue that some combination of... There is a very good reason: as he mentions, the chords diversity use in pop songwriting is typically so poor that based only on that, the amount of things considered plagiarism would thus be ridiculous. If the similarities affect almost all dimensions (style, arrangement, rhythm, melody, ...) to the point of being "essentially the same", then it's exactly what people would want the law to exist for.
- thebricksta 5y ago
  > He most certainly did not. Of all the different takes out there, his is very weak. I think Adam Neely did a good job explaining what infringement lawsuits mean in the context of popular music production. Whether or not you agree with the strength of his case on this particular lawsuit, well that's not quite the point I was trying to make here. Still, what do you consider to be a strong take on this case?

jerf 5y ago

It sounds like you're assuming that they actually have any copyright on this. They don't. It's not identical but see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702117 for some similar issue. And in general, you must be "creative" to have a copyright. You might have a "copyright" on the resulting file, but no court would ever dream of extending that to a claim of copyright on every melody. There is no way that the author was "creative" in any sort of proportion to the amount of material being putatively claimed. Normally one would expect for this to then start a big HN chain arguing the precise definition of "creativity per unit output" that is the threshold, but in addition to the fact you have to get a court to agree to your definition, bear in mind that this is quite literally exponentially little creative effort per output. The author has put in so little effort per output that they haven't even listened to their own "work" once, I'm sure! This is not the normal definition of a "creative work". The usual arguments will be based around a polynomial at most, and frankly usually linear amount of output per "creative input". Especially in light of the fact that the lifespan of a given "creative human being" isn't even "linear" so much as "constant". Given that this is only a very small amount of effort from being able to claim all combinations of notes ever, it's clear this is not a copyrightable work, excepting perhaps the literal output of the work but no more than that. (It's also not that much more work to order these things in entropy order, by analyzing songs and deriving some probability for note lengths and intervals, making it so that one could just start generating melodies and actually hit almost every useful melody in an even "smaller" work. Also not copyrightable.) So, basically, don't learn anything about copyright from this article.

wincy 5y ago
I mean, the game No Man’s Sky procedurally generates 18 quintillion planets but they hold a copyright on all of those planets, don’t they? They certainly haven’t explored all of the planets.
- balls187 5y ago
  I'm assuming you mean the US, right? I was doing legal research on this, and funny enough there is an article that discusses this very issue: http://mttlr.org/2016/11/no-mans-skynet-copyright-in-procedurally-generated-programs/ http://mttlr.org/2016/11/no-mans-skynet-copyright-in-procedu...

kube-system 5y ago

Copyright does take into account the entire work. However, people will sometimes claim that a portion of their work is stolen. The idea here is to give someone a citation of it existing elsewhere as a defense to the above. Although this is a very experimental endeavor and some suspect it won’t be taken very seriously in an actual court, because the context in which it was created may undermine some of the creative requirements for qualification under copyright law.

swamp40 5y ago

What about the silence between notes? Copyrighted or no? Their Jingle Bells sounds horrible with no silent spaces.

matja 5y ago
To fully appreciate the silence between notes, you must experience the full orchestra version of John Cage's 4'33"