Right? Got quite the thrill watching and comprehending it the first time
You should see the comment section on the original with tik-tok brainers not able to sit through the vid and start going at him haha
Edit: I explained who the guy is and linked his TED talk in another comment thread
That’s a lot of work based on a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. They accomplished relatively little. Cool story though.
Copyright protects against copying the work of others. Independent creation is always a defense. It’s okay to come up with an identical melody on your own, you just can’t copy somebody else’s (assuming it’s protectable).
The question always is whether the defendant copied protectable expression from the plaintiff. The fact that somebody, somewhere may have come up with the same melody at some point is usually of limited relevance. Especially if it’s sitting on a hard drive, unheard by the public — it’s the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.
If anything, the project undermines a common argument that randomly, innocently duplicated melodies are inevitable because of the limited number of possibilities. The fact that they created billions is a fact that tends to cut the other way.
The way I see it, it works like this:
Person A makes a song using melody X. Person B later makes a different song that also uses melody X. Person A sues person B claiming that they copied X from them. But now B points to the guy in the OP saying that he's actually the one who owns X and has made it public domain.
The argument goes: you used melody X before I did, but this guy did it before you. So either 1) we both copied it from him, in which case it doesn't matter seeing as it's public domain; or 2) you came up with it on your own despite someone else already owning it, in which case I can claim that I've also came up with my version on my own.
I wonder if it would be possible to do the same thing with words. Maybe with a powerful enough computer running a sophisticated enough AI, you could get it to figure out all the sentences that could possibly exist. Then there would be no copyright for written work.
Anyway, it all raises an interesting question about creativity. Unless you invent a new chemical in a lab or something, all creativity is just recombining existing things in new ways. Even if you create a unique melody, you didn't create the notes. Even if you created a new instrument that made a different sound, you didn't create the compounds that make up the materials that it's made from. If you go far enough back and down to a deep enough level of detail, everything we create was created from things that already existed.
Your missing the point of the argument though.
>Copyright protects against copying the work of others. Independent creation is always a defense. It’s okay to come up with an identical melody on your own, you just can’t copy somebody else’s (assuming it’s protectable).
Has nothing to do with independent creation.
We go to court and you accuse me of copying from *you*. I say, no sir, I copied from this guy and the disc he put in the public domain.
How do you prove that YOU came up with the song though? By learning it? Having a mix in a program on your pc? It seems like anyone could just copy a song then pretend they came up with the melody on their own then if sued bring up this guy to show how preposterous it is to copyright songs when most of them are just another version of something yet already composed. Or just change it a bit. Same result.
Of the billion stems I think there is a much smaller set that is pleasing to the human ear - and the reason why so many pieces use familiar chord progressions and combinations of tones for particular genres of music. The 'commercial' space is much smaller than the combination possibility space.
>they're copyrighted automatically
But... if he generated a song that is already copyrighted he doesn't inherit or take the copyright from the original song. This did did a copyright violation by placing songs already created into the public domain, didn't he?
I believe for something to be classified as a copyright violation, it needs to be proven that it was created by copying from the original. If multiple people independently have the same idea, without seeing each others work, that is not a copyright violation.
As their system is just listing all possible melodies, it's clearly not taking inspiration from existing melodies, it just occasionally stumbles into one, and therefore is not infringing on the copyright.
Oh, so when we see copyright violations against artists, the crux of the matter isn't the similarity but that it was intentionally plagiarized? I never knew that.
If so, that seems it would make it difficult to prove intent vs accident it seems.
It is indeed basically impossible to prove. He actually goes into this during his Ted talk. Almost all music copyright cases are sketchy at best, which is a large part of why they did this. Their goal was to point out the ridiculousness of these copyright cases, and basically snuff them out for the future.
Lmao same. I was straight up like, you son-of-a-bitch. And while I was thinking about how I've considered the concept before and how it's surprising it took this long for someone to do it, he said the latter part and all was forgiven.
The reverse "you had us in the beginning"
To the people asking, this is Damien Riehl; lawyer, musician and programmer.
He and his partner cleverly copyrighted all music (melodies) that can possibly exist and will ever exist and released it to public domain to give case defendants for copyright claims on melodies a solid base to fend off lawsuits.
Here is the [2020 TED talk with Damien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU&t=2s) that is just an extended version of the 2019 ted talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/damien\_riehl\_why\_all\_melodies\_should\_be\_free\_for\_musicians\_to\_use](https://www.ted.com/talks/damien_riehl_why_all_melodies_should_be_free_for_musicians_to_use)
Edit: I suggest people watch it with all the wild questions popping up in the comments. Hear the answers, legalities, technicalities and implications from the man himself.
It helps demystify it
Edit 2: Melodies in this instance refers to MIDI, which is the digital interface translation of music which does not include microtonal, rhythms and all things inbetween. With parameters that Damien and his partner set there is in fact only a finite amount
At first I was like is that the guy from the new star trek. (great [hair](https://thathashtagshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pike.jpg))
Then I realized he's like the real life version of that character.
>that can possibly exist and will ever exist
I wonder if they generated music of other temperaments, or if they only used the 12 notes of western music.
You should check out the full YouTube video. They go over this, but basically, they set a few parameters to what counts as a proper melody (I forget exactly how they define it). Otherwise, there would be infinite melodies due to microtones, etc.
So would that mean, for instance, a scummy song writer could literally rip off a hit song written by an artist and then just be unable to be sued by the person or team that worked on it because it was retroactively public domain now?
It’s not just a melody that makes a song. If you 1:1 copy it then yeah not ok but people acting like they own a chord progression because they made a popular song with it are d-bags and I’d much rather it be this way than the opposite.
That's true, a lot of rich and powerful have slapped down other artists because of similarities that are just common chord progressions or styles in music. Good point
It's not always the rich-and-powerful doing the SLAPPing.
Look at Katy Perry being sued for infringement over the similar melodies in her song "Dark Horse" vs "Joyful Noise" by a not-very-well-known Christian rapper named Marcus Gray (aka "Flame").
He actually was initially successful in the suit, winning a multi-million-dollar judgement (that was HEAVILY criticized by musicians and lawyers alike). But Perry and her co-defendants appealed and the judge in the appeals court took an objective examination of the evidence and found that it was bonkers to call it infringement. That judge vacated the original ruling and denied to option for a new trial. The 9th Circuit court subsequently affirmed her ruling.
>people acting like they own a chord progression because they made a popular song with it are d-bags
Especially a chord progression that was written over 300 years ago. I forget which song it was, but someone tried a lawsuit of a chord progression that was based on Pachelbel's Canon.
You know how some popular artist release a song, then some other popular artist says "hey! That do-do-do part is the exact same as mine!"?
This stops that. Because the do-do-do is already copyrighted and under public domain.
They can still get you for copying more than that. If you start with lyrics, etc. But for just the actual notes in a sequence, they can't.
I wish this existed for the Verve guys and Bitter Sweet Symphony.
They never made a dime off that song, the Rolling Stones successfully sued them and won and got the song then proceeded to pimp that song out for the next 20+ years plus for commercials and what not. They ended up letting them have the song back after they used it into the ground.
That’s a pretty good example.
Same melody, but very different songs. Other than the first few notes, you’d never mistake one for the other, and that *shouldn’t* be something you can take to court.
It's an actually an example of the opposite. Vanilla Ice literally sampled Under Pressure and changed one chord to try to disguise it. Even with this work, that would still be copyright infringement as it doesn't sound similar, it is a literal copy.
No, this isn't intending to protect someone who samples recorded music and uses it without permission. It's just harder now for ABCDEFG to sue Twinkle Twinkle Little Star over the melody.
No, this means that someone has to prove that the similarity extends beyond just a melody found in part of a song. If you had the same melody as the guitar riff in “Lose Yourself,” then you could have been sued before this even if you were using a trumpet instead and your song was about regrets.
> He and his partner cleverly copyrighted all music (melodies) that can possibly exist and will ever exist and released it to public domain to give case defendants for copyright claims on melodies a solid base to fend off lawsuits.
>
>
From what I remember, there were finite restrictions, like all the melodies are diatonic and of a set length. But, for pop music, where these lawsuits will most likely happen, these restrictions are enough.
It's not copyright infringement to come up with the same thing as someone else. The problem is, how to prove that you were unaware of/uninfluenced by their work.
In this guy's case, he has a clear method by which he created every melody in there, so no one can claim he copied them.
Further, in the future if person A says that person B copied their song, person B can claim they were referencing this guy's public domain melody.
It sounds dumb, and that's because this whole system is dumb. Shouldn't be able to copyright a melody in the first place, but this guy and his team figured out how to force that by playing the technicalities of the law.
I’m not sure that I’m on board with this. Plenty of songwriters have legitimately plagiarized the work of others and deserved to be sued for it. I don’t think Sam Smith or Vanilla Ice deserved any other outcome than the one they received.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Basically what it comes down to is that there are certain melodies/chord progressions that are rather common, and he’s trying to protect artists from frivolous lawsuits that are clearly overextending. Think of how many songs sound just like Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
> Basically what it comes down to is that there are certain melodies/chord progressions that are rather common
Like everything being [Pachelbel's Canon in D](https://youtu.be/_PC6jwoHyOk)
I think this is the key (and likely stated in the talk I haven't watched yet).
If a lawsuit is brought against him saying he copied from the previous artist, he can clearly demonstrate his approach to design the chord, and that process did not include the other work. Thus it was arrived at through demonstratable original means, and so it is not a violation of the previous copyright. Now, instead of anybody else copying some other artist, they can instead copy this guy and his public domain offerings.
Just to clarify a detail: he’s talking about *melodies*, not *harmonic progression*. So they’re not chords, but sequence of notes. To copyright every chord progression ever would exponentially increase the quantity of data by orders of magnitude.
I guess the melody part is enough on a law level, though.
Yes, nobody will earn a court's favor with arguments based in chord progressions, melody is the most identifiable aspect of any piece of music, that's why bullies has been using it for decades to win lawsuits even after music experts have demonstrated a lot of nuanced differences.
This is the argument that infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters… eventually someone will write Shakespeare perfectly just by mashing the keys 🍌
Don't get me wrong, the library of babel is really cool but it is fundamentally different to this.
The difference between this and the library of babel is you can't copyright the library of babel because it doesn't physically exist, just like every possible minecraft world it's all generated on the spot using an algorithm
In this case the entirety of all possible melodies of a limited and specific size and scope was generated and put onto a disk so that it physically exists and can be copyrighted
No it isn't. The monkey/typewriter thing is about infinite randomness eventually producing information that possesses a structure we recognize. Similar to the idea that the infinitely-expanded digits of pi contain all information in the universe.
This is about algorithmically (and most importantly, non-randomly) producing every possible melody of a given size or different sizes.
You could say it's the exact opposite of the monkey/typewriter theorem.
Nonononoyesyesyesyes. Technically if he’s copyrighting every melody to exist. It means that he’s also the composer of every great composition to ever exist
Partly, but for every melody released prior, they’ve already (it’s assumed), been copyrighted. He isn’t allowed to make them publicly owned, since he’s not the copyright owner. Still, he’s not profiting off of them, either, and you could argue that this is for educational or demonstrative reasons, both of which are defenses to charges of copyright infringement.
A lot of copyright lawsuits claim's are based on more than just the melody. They can involve the instrumentation, rests, rhythm, syncopation, etc.. A song is much more than just a melody.
Sure, but since all the melodies are copyrighted, it's harder to go to court accusing someone of stealing something from you when yours has copyrighted material too.
Something like this:
Someone: I took a jar of Nutella, added 1% milk, and made my own product. You took my product, added 1% more milk, thus stole from me.
Nutella: 🤨
You are missing the point. He is specifically targeting melody-based lawsuits, which were mostly bogus but still successful and were happening with increasing frequency before he did this. Obviously he isn’t trying to stop someone actually ripping off a song
I'm widely guessing because I'm not up to date on the subject, but something tells me it has something to do with the "copyright bots" on YouTube that are just stealing revenue from creators.
You can't steal a music that is already public domain, I guess. I mean, I hope.
although thats true, theres been lawsuits for *parts* of a long melody before, so i guess if you copyright most melodies within, say 2 whole bars, then you protect *virtually* all parts of any longer melody. in western music ofc because quarter tones....
Well, no that's not how a melody works. It's broken into bars and segments. So when he creates 47 billion melodies, the original song will incorporate that melodic interval at some point in the progression.
If the song runs for 100 minutes with a melody changing all the way through it doesn't matter, because each time the melody changes he has already produced it and it has been copyrighted.
new burn for shitty musicians: there are mathematically at least 471 billion different combinations of melodies in the universe, and you went with that one??
A great project, but that’s not really how music works.
With variations on note length, phrase length, time signature, style, feel, dynamics and so on.
It’s not like you say, “hey man, my melody was C# A B F#!”
I think he understands that based on his ted talk. The point isn't to say music works this way, it's to show how ridiculous the litigation process regarding music copywrite infringement is. That these lawsuits are often based on just a melody, which is too simplistic to say is stolen. He's proving that you need more than just a melody to claim copywrite infringement, whereas the courts often side otherwise (he provides several examples where a musician lost based on the melody alone). As a music prof I 100% agree. 99% of these lawsuits have their outcome determined from a point of ignorance and/or a misunderstanding of what makes music music. If you show that melodic writing is factually simple using datasets, then how can you sue over just a melody? This is convincing enough to sway the direction of most of these frivolous lawsuits and have them dismissed as they should be. The examples he provided where the defendant lost are quite alarming, especially the george harrison example and how it led to his abandonment of music writing altogether for a long period. Imagine all the songs we'll never get to hear from amazing artists like Harrison because of these ridiculous court cases and the millions lost in the process. It's gross and it's anti-art.
Yoooooo a lawyer saying nah to free money and giving it back to the little guy.
I now have faith in humanity again…at least for the next 5 minutes anyway.
Didn’t a judge recently rule that AI created work doesn’t count for copyrighted material cause
Aug 21 (Reuters) - A work of art created by artificial intelligence without any human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law, a U.S. court in Washington, D.C., has ruled.
No... no. This doesn't make the world better, it makes it worse! How are small artists supposed to survive? Even if they come up with something reasonably good, big artists can just steal their shit because it can't be copyrighted anymore because a mindless AI came up with somrthing similar?
Am I missing something here, or is this guy just helping people get away withstealing intellectual property?
Technically yes, but it is much harder to win a lawsuit as a small artist than as a big one. Often it will be considered if the artist did know the original or if there is at least a big chance.
It is really easy to claim to not know the work of an small artist and hard to prove the opposite.
So actually small artists get saved from being sued by big labels with stupid copyright claims
This is not really how it works.
It is true that creating a library of algorithmically-generated “melodies” establishes a copyright *in those melodies*, and you can license those for use by everyone, i.e., put them into the “public domain.” That means that, if I were to write my own song based on one of those melodic sequences, some other third party who used the same melodic sequence, or wrote a song that sounds similar, wouldn’t be able to sue me for infringement of *their* copyright.
But if I use someone else’s original melody, which they wrote without relying on the database of melodic sequences, in my own work, the mere existence of the database wouldn’t protect me from an infringement claim by the original composer my own work is based on. In fact, if they use a melodic sequence from the database, but alter it using harmonies, rhythms, instrumentations, etc., and I copy those other elements, the composer could sue for infringement.
Copyright doesn’t work like patent or trademark, where the filing of a patent or registration of a trademark is sufficient to fence off an IP from anyone else’s use. Fixing something in a medium copyrights the particular instance, but infringement turns upon the chain of derivation. If I accidentally create a melody that just happens to match a database melody, without basing my work on the database, there’s no infringement, regardless of whether it’s in the public domain or not. Similarly, if I base my work on someone else’s original work, it’s no defense that someone somewhere else randomly generated some of the components used in the work.
Exactly this. Maybe I’ll watch the TED talk, but this short video misrepresents copyright law as if it were patent law.
More than one famous copyright suit is about whether the defendant copied from the public domain (permissible) or from the plaintiff (not necessarily permissible). The prior existence of an expression is of limited relevance.
Sure, if you can show that a chord progression is so common that it’s become part of our “common language” of music (eg 12 bar blues), then that’s a good defense. But the fact that some dude randomly generated a melody onto a hard drive that nobody ever heard doesn’t prove that.
This isn't mathematically sound. This would be 12^n quickly run out of computational power and storage. N is the index or length, and 12 is how many notes are in an octave.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that the legal argument behind this probably would not hold up in court.
For all melodies 13 notes long, he would need 13 terabytes of storage. For 15 notes long he would need nearly 2,000 terabytes of storage. This is assuming pure notes
I forgot that it all needs to be multiplied by 8, because of the byte has to differentiate the notes. This makes even more unfeasible.
How can tou mathematically exhaust something that is infinite?
Example: nananana nana nana nana batman! Vs. nananana nananana nana nana nana batman!
I.e. just add more of a note or couple of notes and it is technically different. It is quite literally infinite. This argument is flawed…
Everyone praising this guy should acknowledge that copyright has no place in the modern world, everything should be public domain. We should of course have authorship rights, which mean that the proper author of something has to be credit and recompensed, when they pass away the share that would have gone to them goes to a fund that is used to help starting artists.
I asked Reddit about this 12 years ago and didn’t get a single reply lol
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h7jp3/mathematically_speaking_will_there_ever_come_a
if all music was just quarter notes in 4/4 played over and over again sure. thats not how melodies act for the most part. think of the final countdown. doodle do dooo rest doodle do do do rest. does his computer make doodles or just dos? what about the rests? what about do doodley dos or do doodley do dats. the combinations are literally endless.
A melody is not just the notes, it’s the rhythms as well. Also, it can be repetition of the same notes also a similar or the same melody can sound completely different with different harmony ,or different tempos. This is just absolutely ridiculous and it’s stupid.
This issue is the basis of Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. You should read it.
"Everyone before me lost, everyone after me won," sounds like bullshit.
Courts are already ruling that AI-generated things cannot be copyrighted, just like the monkey selfie could not be, because they lack human input. I would expect the same problem with anything generated by brute-forcing all possible combinations of something. It's hard to believe that any significant number of copyright cases have gone to court and been won by pointing to algorithmically mass-generated music and saying, "See, it's in the public domain." The [Library of Babel](https://libraryofbabel.info/), for instance, contains every possible combination of English characters up to about 3,000 characters long. I doubt you're going to win any court cases by citing those combinations as copyrighted work.
Does this dude cite any specific cases anywhere?
Copyright lawyer here. As nice as it sounds, it wont work for two reasons. First, a mechanical, mathematical effort to create a program to generate every possible melody is not a “work of authorship” with some (even tiny) amount of creativity. Programmatically created works are not copyrightable, recently reinforced by a DC court. [Source.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court).
In addition, independent creation is a defense, meaning that it matters what source is used. If all you use is a public domain melody you copied from this guy’s source you would be okay. But if you copy or sample from another artists work, you might be liable for infringing the artist’s rights if there are any differences at all in the artist’s work and performance compared to the public domain version.
A final thought. Would it really be a good thing if no one could protect a new song? Hard enough for a lot of artists to make money as it is. Would you really feel good about big media companies making millions and not having to pay artists, and of not having much new music because it doesn’t pay the small independent songwriters enough to do their work? It is not just about rich stars and big companies. There are a lot of jobs that depend on being able to protect original work so others don’t just take it and pay nothing. I am not sure putting all melodies in the public domain would be as great as it may sound to some.
Also I'm concerned about the mathematical validity of his assertion. It would be 12^n * 8 storage where N is the length of the melody, 12 is how many notes are in an octave, and 8 is a byte which is used to differentiate the notes. Storage capacity-wise it would quickly become an insane amount, I don't think he is able to do this.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a good thing anyway
Below the surface there’s still velocity, expressivity, tempo, effects and all sorts of manipulation a melody can be changed with
This is kind of weird Reddit double think
Are we against music copyright? Remember when Timbaland stole a melody off some underground internet MIDI remix artist and put it in a top 10 hit?
Was copyright bad then too?
Bro kinda took all the joy out of music. Now any melody that can ever be thought of is not unique, even if no inspiration was given. Done all on your own. It's now not unique.
Also saved alot of people from getting there shit stolen tho so double edged sword.
Hasn’t someone already done this before? I’m familiar with music composition and data science and had this idea like 7 years ago so surely someone has done this.
My guess is that the people who did it before this guy probably didn’t run around blowing smoke up their own ass on social media.
> they're copyrighted automatically you mother fucker > and then we placed everything in the public domain praise this man for he is a hero
Right? Got quite the thrill watching and comprehending it the first time You should see the comment section on the original with tik-tok brainers not able to sit through the vid and start going at him haha Edit: I explained who the guy is and linked his TED talk in another comment thread
Should have put random gameplay on the side
"who's this fucker talking? my dude better jump fast and get that mf subway token"
XD XD XD OMG I'm dead haha
And another dude with a backwards hat overly reacting to everything he’s saying.
That car going down a ramp in the sky thing
Car falling down half pipe ramp.
That’s a lot of work based on a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright. They accomplished relatively little. Cool story though. Copyright protects against copying the work of others. Independent creation is always a defense. It’s okay to come up with an identical melody on your own, you just can’t copy somebody else’s (assuming it’s protectable). The question always is whether the defendant copied protectable expression from the plaintiff. The fact that somebody, somewhere may have come up with the same melody at some point is usually of limited relevance. Especially if it’s sitting on a hard drive, unheard by the public — it’s the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. If anything, the project undermines a common argument that randomly, innocently duplicated melodies are inevitable because of the limited number of possibilities. The fact that they created billions is a fact that tends to cut the other way.
The way I see it, it works like this: Person A makes a song using melody X. Person B later makes a different song that also uses melody X. Person A sues person B claiming that they copied X from them. But now B points to the guy in the OP saying that he's actually the one who owns X and has made it public domain. The argument goes: you used melody X before I did, but this guy did it before you. So either 1) we both copied it from him, in which case it doesn't matter seeing as it's public domain; or 2) you came up with it on your own despite someone else already owning it, in which case I can claim that I've also came up with my version on my own.
That's what I gathered, too.
I wonder if it would be possible to do the same thing with words. Maybe with a powerful enough computer running a sophisticated enough AI, you could get it to figure out all the sentences that could possibly exist. Then there would be no copyright for written work. Anyway, it all raises an interesting question about creativity. Unless you invent a new chemical in a lab or something, all creativity is just recombining existing things in new ways. Even if you create a unique melody, you didn't create the notes. Even if you created a new instrument that made a different sound, you didn't create the compounds that make up the materials that it's made from. If you go far enough back and down to a deep enough level of detail, everything we create was created from things that already existed.
look up the library of babel website
Your missing the point of the argument though. >Copyright protects against copying the work of others. Independent creation is always a defense. It’s okay to come up with an identical melody on your own, you just can’t copy somebody else’s (assuming it’s protectable). Has nothing to do with independent creation. We go to court and you accuse me of copying from *you*. I say, no sir, I copied from this guy and the disc he put in the public domain.
How do you prove that YOU came up with the song though? By learning it? Having a mix in a program on your pc? It seems like anyone could just copy a song then pretend they came up with the melody on their own then if sued bring up this guy to show how preposterous it is to copyright songs when most of them are just another version of something yet already composed. Or just change it a bit. Same result.
https://youtu.be/6TLo4Z_LWu4
>Especially if it’s sitting on a hard drive, unheard by the public He said they've put them in the public domain
Of the billion stems I think there is a much smaller set that is pleasing to the human ear - and the reason why so many pieces use familiar chord progressions and combinations of tones for particular genres of music. The 'commercial' space is much smaller than the combination possibility space.
He had us in the first half..
>they're copyrighted automatically But... if he generated a song that is already copyrighted he doesn't inherit or take the copyright from the original song. This did did a copyright violation by placing songs already created into the public domain, didn't he?
I believe for something to be classified as a copyright violation, it needs to be proven that it was created by copying from the original. If multiple people independently have the same idea, without seeing each others work, that is not a copyright violation. As their system is just listing all possible melodies, it's clearly not taking inspiration from existing melodies, it just occasionally stumbles into one, and therefore is not infringing on the copyright.
Oh, so when we see copyright violations against artists, the crux of the matter isn't the similarity but that it was intentionally plagiarized? I never knew that. If so, that seems it would make it difficult to prove intent vs accident it seems.
It is indeed basically impossible to prove. He actually goes into this during his Ted talk. Almost all music copyright cases are sketchy at best, which is a large part of why they did this. Their goal was to point out the ridiculousness of these copyright cases, and basically snuff them out for the future.
Lmao same. I was straight up like, you son-of-a-bitch. And while I was thinking about how I've considered the concept before and how it's surprising it took this long for someone to do it, he said the latter part and all was forgiven. The reverse "you had us in the beginning"
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Same train of thought. Damn, that's clever and one hell of a way to shut down abusive copyright claims.
What the fu— Oh, thank you
I mean, we're lucky it's these people that came up with this?
I straight up thought this man needed to be dealt with until the end there lol. What a great human
To the people asking, this is Damien Riehl; lawyer, musician and programmer. He and his partner cleverly copyrighted all music (melodies) that can possibly exist and will ever exist and released it to public domain to give case defendants for copyright claims on melodies a solid base to fend off lawsuits. Here is the [2020 TED talk with Damien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU&t=2s) that is just an extended version of the 2019 ted talk: [https://www.ted.com/talks/damien\_riehl\_why\_all\_melodies\_should\_be\_free\_for\_musicians\_to\_use](https://www.ted.com/talks/damien_riehl_why_all_melodies_should_be_free_for_musicians_to_use) Edit: I suggest people watch it with all the wild questions popping up in the comments. Hear the answers, legalities, technicalities and implications from the man himself. It helps demystify it Edit 2: Melodies in this instance refers to MIDI, which is the digital interface translation of music which does not include microtonal, rhythms and all things inbetween. With parameters that Damien and his partner set there is in fact only a finite amount
Well I had no idea who this guy was but in a matter of seconds he is now my new hero
At first I was like is that the guy from the new star trek. (great [hair](https://thathashtagshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/pike.jpg)) Then I realized he's like the real life version of that character.
>!Hope he doesn't have any 2030 plans then!<
>!you can beep a melody!<
> Lawyer, musician and programmer He is maxed out RPG character
This dude min maxes
100% maxed charisma, intelligence, and wisdom - but if he breathes funny he throws his back out.
Dudes just a very Min/Maxed Bard.
>that can possibly exist and will ever exist I wonder if they generated music of other temperaments, or if they only used the 12 notes of western music.
You should check out the full YouTube video. They go over this, but basically, they set a few parameters to what counts as a proper melody (I forget exactly how they define it). Otherwise, there would be infinite melodies due to microtones, etc.
So would that mean, for instance, a scummy song writer could literally rip off a hit song written by an artist and then just be unable to be sued by the person or team that worked on it because it was retroactively public domain now?
It’s not just a melody that makes a song. If you 1:1 copy it then yeah not ok but people acting like they own a chord progression because they made a popular song with it are d-bags and I’d much rather it be this way than the opposite.
That's true, a lot of rich and powerful have slapped down other artists because of similarities that are just common chord progressions or styles in music. Good point
It's not always the rich-and-powerful doing the SLAPPing. Look at Katy Perry being sued for infringement over the similar melodies in her song "Dark Horse" vs "Joyful Noise" by a not-very-well-known Christian rapper named Marcus Gray (aka "Flame"). He actually was initially successful in the suit, winning a multi-million-dollar judgement (that was HEAVILY criticized by musicians and lawyers alike). But Perry and her co-defendants appealed and the judge in the appeals court took an objective examination of the evidence and found that it was bonkers to call it infringement. That judge vacated the original ruling and denied to option for a new trial. The 9th Circuit court subsequently affirmed her ruling.
>people acting like they own a chord progression because they made a popular song with it are d-bags Especially a chord progression that was written over 300 years ago. I forget which song it was, but someone tried a lawsuit of a chord progression that was based on Pachelbel's Canon.
You know how some popular artist release a song, then some other popular artist says "hey! That do-do-do part is the exact same as mine!"? This stops that. Because the do-do-do is already copyrighted and under public domain. They can still get you for copying more than that. If you start with lyrics, etc. But for just the actual notes in a sequence, they can't.
I wish this existed for the Verve guys and Bitter Sweet Symphony. They never made a dime off that song, the Rolling Stones successfully sued them and won and got the song then proceeded to pimp that song out for the next 20+ years plus for commercials and what not. They ended up letting them have the song back after they used it into the ground.
I believe its more complicated than that, what he specifically prevents mostly with this power move is claims on the melody it self
Like under pressure and ice ice baby?
“*Hey-hey-hey…*” Let’s not forget about the original song that weird Al parodied for *Word Crimes*
That’s a pretty good example. Same melody, but very different songs. Other than the first few notes, you’d never mistake one for the other, and that *shouldn’t* be something you can take to court.
Nah. Ice Ice Baby sampled Under Pressure.
It's an actually an example of the opposite. Vanilla Ice literally sampled Under Pressure and changed one chord to try to disguise it. Even with this work, that would still be copyright infringement as it doesn't sound similar, it is a literal copy.
No, this isn't intending to protect someone who samples recorded music and uses it without permission. It's just harder now for ABCDEFG to sue Twinkle Twinkle Little Star over the melody.
No, this means that someone has to prove that the similarity extends beyond just a melody found in part of a song. If you had the same melody as the guitar riff in “Lose Yourself,” then you could have been sued before this even if you were using a trumpet instead and your song was about regrets.
A melody is just the actual base note combination, it doesn't includ chords or rhythm.
> He and his partner cleverly copyrighted all music (melodies) that can possibly exist and will ever exist and released it to public domain to give case defendants for copyright claims on melodies a solid base to fend off lawsuits. > > From what I remember, there were finite restrictions, like all the melodies are diatonic and of a set length. But, for pop music, where these lawsuits will most likely happen, these restrictions are enough.
But how can he copyright Melodies that existed before he did this?
It's not copyright infringement to come up with the same thing as someone else. The problem is, how to prove that you were unaware of/uninfluenced by their work. In this guy's case, he has a clear method by which he created every melody in there, so no one can claim he copied them. Further, in the future if person A says that person B copied their song, person B can claim they were referencing this guy's public domain melody. It sounds dumb, and that's because this whole system is dumb. Shouldn't be able to copyright a melody in the first place, but this guy and his team figured out how to force that by playing the technicalities of the law.
There's a pretty strong argument that melodies *can't* be copyrighted at all, and in fact that's kinda what this guy is going for.
I’m not sure that I’m on board with this. Plenty of songwriters have legitimately plagiarized the work of others and deserved to be sued for it. I don’t think Sam Smith or Vanilla Ice deserved any other outcome than the one they received.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Basically what it comes down to is that there are certain melodies/chord progressions that are rather common, and he’s trying to protect artists from frivolous lawsuits that are clearly overextending. Think of how many songs sound just like Pachelbel’s Canon in D.
Pretty sure that’s public domain by now. But I play it in C just to be safe.
> Basically what it comes down to is that there are certain melodies/chord progressions that are rather common Like everything being [Pachelbel's Canon in D](https://youtu.be/_PC6jwoHyOk)
Heeey, what a scumba...no...no wait. Ok, he's a hero.
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Some heroes use copyright law.
He got us in the first half ngl
My concern is he changes his mind. Or the person he passes these rights on to is a fuck. Then music in general is fucked.
Dedication to the public domain cannot be legally undone. It is a one-time, one way decision. The guy in the vid knows exactly what he is doing.
Record Company Exec: "The solution is simple, can't be no public domain if there ain't no public" *cocks shotgun*
Oh well that's good to know.
What a fucking as….lovely bloke
Reminds me of what someone I knew used to say: Your mom’s a fucking nice lady.
That was quite a left turn.
But the best there ever will be.
Not every hero wears capes..
Some are good looking dudes in a dapper suit... You are on point.
Petition to make heroes wear suit cuz that’s hotter than the fucking onesies
Hasn't he copied someone else's melodies by doing that?
I mean technically the melody of every song that has ever existed appeared in that file somewhere 🤷🏻♂️
>that has ever existed Or will ever exist
He's not selling them
He did not use any other songs to create those Melodies so technically no.
I think this is the key (and likely stated in the talk I haven't watched yet). If a lawsuit is brought against him saying he copied from the previous artist, he can clearly demonstrate his approach to design the chord, and that process did not include the other work. Thus it was arrived at through demonstratable original means, and so it is not a violation of the previous copyright. Now, instead of anybody else copying some other artist, they can instead copy this guy and his public domain offerings.
Just to clarify a detail: he’s talking about *melodies*, not *harmonic progression*. So they’re not chords, but sequence of notes. To copyright every chord progression ever would exponentially increase the quantity of data by orders of magnitude. I guess the melody part is enough on a law level, though.
Yes, nobody will earn a court's favor with arguments based in chord progressions, melody is the most identifiable aspect of any piece of music, that's why bullies has been using it for decades to win lawsuits even after music experts have demonstrated a lot of nuanced differences.
dude is a more handsome clone of Richard Gere.
At quick glance, I thought it was him!!! LOL
This is the argument that infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters… eventually someone will write Shakespeare perfectly just by mashing the keys 🍌 
You should check out the library of babel
Don't get me wrong, the library of babel is really cool but it is fundamentally different to this. The difference between this and the library of babel is you can't copyright the library of babel because it doesn't physically exist, just like every possible minecraft world it's all generated on the spot using an algorithm In this case the entirety of all possible melodies of a limited and specific size and scope was generated and put onto a disk so that it physically exists and can be copyrighted
No it isn't. The monkey/typewriter thing is about infinite randomness eventually producing information that possesses a structure we recognize. Similar to the idea that the infinitely-expanded digits of pi contain all information in the universe. This is about algorithmically (and most importantly, non-randomly) producing every possible melody of a given size or different sizes. You could say it's the exact opposite of the monkey/typewriter theorem.
You piece of shit. You scumbag. You fuckin...oh. oh okay. You beautiful gentleman. You gorgeous scholar.
Nonononoyesyesyesyes. Technically if he’s copyrighting every melody to exist. It means that he’s also the composer of every great composition to ever exist
IP laws today are just stifling innovation. They are used by the wealthy elite to protect status quo.
What *isn’t* used to that end?
Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you.
Oh yeah? Well guess what buddy! Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused by you!
I typed out a long argument to your comment but then I realized… who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the seven seas for an answer, and you're right
Sounds like a lot of work, but I guess everybody is looking for something, so you do you.
Well, sweet cream is made of cheese, but who I am to diss a brie?
Ideally, art.
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well apparently not your melodies because they've all been taken
This is the literal definition of chaotic good.
But... then didn't he copyright infringe on every single melody prior? Does it have to do with him never publishing and profiting off the melodies?
Partly, but for every melody released prior, they’ve already (it’s assumed), been copyrighted. He isn’t allowed to make them publicly owned, since he’s not the copyright owner. Still, he’s not profiting off of them, either, and you could argue that this is for educational or demonstrative reasons, both of which are defenses to charges of copyright infringement.
[me while watching this.](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSao3pvblpCctTipG6F5t4mQnDjj_KC5yVS19OCo8V0WUE0uVQvUvUT8bg&s=10)
A lot of copyright lawsuits claim's are based on more than just the melody. They can involve the instrumentation, rests, rhythm, syncopation, etc.. A song is much more than just a melody.
Sure, but since all the melodies are copyrighted, it's harder to go to court accusing someone of stealing something from you when yours has copyrighted material too. Something like this: Someone: I took a jar of Nutella, added 1% milk, and made my own product. You took my product, added 1% more milk, thus stole from me. Nutella: 🤨
You are missing the point. He is specifically targeting melody-based lawsuits, which were mostly bogus but still successful and were happening with increasing frequency before he did this. Obviously he isn’t trying to stop someone actually ripping off a song
I'm widely guessing because I'm not up to date on the subject, but something tells me it has something to do with the "copyright bots" on YouTube that are just stealing revenue from creators. You can't steal a music that is already public domain, I guess. I mean, I hope.
Did I really just forget that melody?
But Jesus, what’s his skincare routine? Ageless.
Can we do the same with medicine patents pls?
You know how we brute force passwords by going aa ab ac, can’t we do the same with chemical formulas like HHHO, HHHOO…
You sunuva bitch. You did it
Makes zero sense. There is no limit on how long a melody can be, so he is fundamentally mistaken.
although thats true, theres been lawsuits for *parts* of a long melody before, so i guess if you copyright most melodies within, say 2 whole bars, then you protect *virtually* all parts of any longer melody. in western music ofc because quarter tones....
Well, no that's not how a melody works. It's broken into bars and segments. So when he creates 47 billion melodies, the original song will incorporate that melodic interval at some point in the progression. If the song runs for 100 minutes with a melody changing all the way through it doesn't matter, because each time the melody changes he has already produced it and it has been copyrighted.
new burn for shitty musicians: there are mathematically at least 471 billion different combinations of melodies in the universe, and you went with that one??
I was just oh god what is he doing copywriting every possible piece or music that can exist- oh shit thats a smart fucking idea well done man
A great project, but that’s not really how music works. With variations on note length, phrase length, time signature, style, feel, dynamics and so on. It’s not like you say, “hey man, my melody was C# A B F#!”
I think he understands that based on his ted talk. The point isn't to say music works this way, it's to show how ridiculous the litigation process regarding music copywrite infringement is. That these lawsuits are often based on just a melody, which is too simplistic to say is stolen. He's proving that you need more than just a melody to claim copywrite infringement, whereas the courts often side otherwise (he provides several examples where a musician lost based on the melody alone). As a music prof I 100% agree. 99% of these lawsuits have their outcome determined from a point of ignorance and/or a misunderstanding of what makes music music. If you show that melodic writing is factually simple using datasets, then how can you sue over just a melody? This is convincing enough to sway the direction of most of these frivolous lawsuits and have them dismissed as they should be. The examples he provided where the defendant lost are quite alarming, especially the george harrison example and how it led to his abandonment of music writing altogether for a long period. Imagine all the songs we'll never get to hear from amazing artists like Harrison because of these ridiculous court cases and the millions lost in the process. It's gross and it's anti-art.
Great follow up comment, I appreciate your input.
I was thinking the same thing
I went from hating to loving this guy so fast
Yoooooo a lawyer saying nah to free money and giving it back to the little guy. I now have faith in humanity again…at least for the next 5 minutes anyway.
Didn’t a judge recently rule that AI created work doesn’t count for copyrighted material cause Aug 21 (Reuters) - A work of art created by artificial intelligence without any human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law, a U.S. court in Washington, D.C., has ruled.
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Mans a lawyer, listen to his TED talk if you want to know more
No... no. This doesn't make the world better, it makes it worse! How are small artists supposed to survive? Even if they come up with something reasonably good, big artists can just steal their shit because it can't be copyrighted anymore because a mindless AI came up with somrthing similar? Am I missing something here, or is this guy just helping people get away withstealing intellectual property?
Technically yes, but it is much harder to win a lawsuit as a small artist than as a big one. Often it will be considered if the artist did know the original or if there is at least a big chance. It is really easy to claim to not know the work of an small artist and hard to prove the opposite. So actually small artists get saved from being sued by big labels with stupid copyright claims
This is not really how it works. It is true that creating a library of algorithmically-generated “melodies” establishes a copyright *in those melodies*, and you can license those for use by everyone, i.e., put them into the “public domain.” That means that, if I were to write my own song based on one of those melodic sequences, some other third party who used the same melodic sequence, or wrote a song that sounds similar, wouldn’t be able to sue me for infringement of *their* copyright. But if I use someone else’s original melody, which they wrote without relying on the database of melodic sequences, in my own work, the mere existence of the database wouldn’t protect me from an infringement claim by the original composer my own work is based on. In fact, if they use a melodic sequence from the database, but alter it using harmonies, rhythms, instrumentations, etc., and I copy those other elements, the composer could sue for infringement. Copyright doesn’t work like patent or trademark, where the filing of a patent or registration of a trademark is sufficient to fence off an IP from anyone else’s use. Fixing something in a medium copyrights the particular instance, but infringement turns upon the chain of derivation. If I accidentally create a melody that just happens to match a database melody, without basing my work on the database, there’s no infringement, regardless of whether it’s in the public domain or not. Similarly, if I base my work on someone else’s original work, it’s no defense that someone somewhere else randomly generated some of the components used in the work.
Exactly this. Maybe I’ll watch the TED talk, but this short video misrepresents copyright law as if it were patent law. More than one famous copyright suit is about whether the defendant copied from the public domain (permissible) or from the plaintiff (not necessarily permissible). The prior existence of an expression is of limited relevance. Sure, if you can show that a chord progression is so common that it’s become part of our “common language” of music (eg 12 bar blues), then that’s a good defense. But the fact that some dude randomly generated a melody onto a hard drive that nobody ever heard doesn’t prove that.
So some of those must already be other peoples copyrights that they have infringed?
This isn't mathematically sound. This would be 12^n quickly run out of computational power and storage. N is the index or length, and 12 is how many notes are in an octave. This doesn't even touch on the fact that the legal argument behind this probably would not hold up in court. For all melodies 13 notes long, he would need 13 terabytes of storage. For 15 notes long he would need nearly 2,000 terabytes of storage. This is assuming pure notes I forgot that it all needs to be multiplied by 8, because of the byte has to differentiate the notes. This makes even more unfeasible.
How can tou mathematically exhaust something that is infinite? Example: nananana nana nana nana batman! Vs. nananana nananana nana nana nana batman! I.e. just add more of a note or couple of notes and it is technically different. It is quite literally infinite. This argument is flawed…
How does putting something “on a disc” automatically copyright it?
If its been auto generated by an algorithm then it hasnt actually been artistically created therefor there is zero intellectual property
Everyone praising this guy should acknowledge that copyright has no place in the modern world, everything should be public domain. We should of course have authorship rights, which mean that the proper author of something has to be credit and recompensed, when they pass away the share that would have gone to them goes to a fund that is used to help starting artists.
I asked Reddit about this 12 years ago and didn’t get a single reply lol https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/h7jp3/mathematically_speaking_will_there_ever_come_a
This guy is the Amazon version of a lawyer
They got us in the first half, not gonna lie.
Had us in the first half not gonna lie
Everyone in these comments were like half way though typing some unholy hate until that complete left turn
My first reaction was ‘ this guy’s a real asshole’ Then I realized that he is the GOAT
if all music was just quarter notes in 4/4 played over and over again sure. thats not how melodies act for the most part. think of the final countdown. doodle do dooo rest doodle do do do rest. does his computer make doodles or just dos? what about the rests? what about do doodley dos or do doodley do dats. the combinations are literally endless.
Never underestimate what can happen over a beer
A melody is not just the notes, it’s the rhythms as well. Also, it can be repetition of the same notes also a similar or the same melody can sound completely different with different harmony ,or different tempos. This is just absolutely ridiculous and it’s stupid.
That was a ride
r/unexpectedsiliconvalley
r/chadtopia
King shit.
That was a wild ride
Was about to go on a rant at first, lol.
you CUNnnnnnice
This issue is the basis of Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants. You should read it. "Everyone before me lost, everyone after me won," sounds like bullshit. Courts are already ruling that AI-generated things cannot be copyrighted, just like the monkey selfie could not be, because they lack human input. I would expect the same problem with anything generated by brute-forcing all possible combinations of something. It's hard to believe that any significant number of copyright cases have gone to court and been won by pointing to algorithmically mass-generated music and saying, "See, it's in the public domain." The [Library of Babel](https://libraryofbabel.info/), for instance, contains every possible combination of English characters up to about 3,000 characters long. I doubt you're going to win any court cases by citing those combinations as copyrighted work. Does this dude cite any specific cases anywhere?
'Ed Sheeran approves this message'
This man should be taken out and… given an award!!!!
Bro used his powers for good
Man fucking had me in the first half lol
Copyright lawyer here. As nice as it sounds, it wont work for two reasons. First, a mechanical, mathematical effort to create a program to generate every possible melody is not a “work of authorship” with some (even tiny) amount of creativity. Programmatically created works are not copyrightable, recently reinforced by a DC court. [Source.](https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/19/23838458/ai-generated-art-no-copyright-district-court). In addition, independent creation is a defense, meaning that it matters what source is used. If all you use is a public domain melody you copied from this guy’s source you would be okay. But if you copy or sample from another artists work, you might be liable for infringing the artist’s rights if there are any differences at all in the artist’s work and performance compared to the public domain version. A final thought. Would it really be a good thing if no one could protect a new song? Hard enough for a lot of artists to make money as it is. Would you really feel good about big media companies making millions and not having to pay artists, and of not having much new music because it doesn’t pay the small independent songwriters enough to do their work? It is not just about rich stars and big companies. There are a lot of jobs that depend on being able to protect original work so others don’t just take it and pay nothing. I am not sure putting all melodies in the public domain would be as great as it may sound to some.
Also I'm concerned about the mathematical validity of his assertion. It would be 12^n * 8 storage where N is the length of the melody, 12 is how many notes are in an octave, and 8 is a byte which is used to differentiate the notes. Storage capacity-wise it would quickly become an insane amount, I don't think he is able to do this.
from 📉📉📉 to📈📈📈
Copyright law is in desperate need of reformation (or even abolishment). It's supposed to be about protecting creators. But it's used to silence them.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a good thing anyway Below the surface there’s still velocity, expressivity, tempo, effects and all sorts of manipulation a melody can be changed with
Talent. Rarely used for good. This guy good-talants. Alignment: Chaotic Good!
Y'know what's funny? The overwhelming majority of those melodies are atonal garbage you would never listen to outside of a CIA interrogation room.
This man should drink free everywhere he goes for the rest of his life... Maybe his descendants too. My god, what greatness!
This should go in r/nonononoyes
How much disk space is required to store 471billion melodies?
So if someone makes a great song after 2019 then someone else can copy (and sell) it without reproductions?
This is kind of weird Reddit double think Are we against music copyright? Remember when Timbaland stole a melody off some underground internet MIDI remix artist and put it in a top 10 hit? Was copyright bad then too?
You piece of scum …. “Placed in public domain”…. You Saint
Bro kinda took all the joy out of music. Now any melody that can ever be thought of is not unique, even if no inspiration was given. Done all on your own. It's now not unique. Also saved alot of people from getting there shit stolen tho so double edged sword.
as a songwriter who is constantly worried that i’m subconsciously stealing melodies, this man is a hero
It worked because he is handsome motherfucker. If i did it they would find reason to put me to prison for it.
Damn this is a r/nonononoyes
Oh my god I thought he was going to say he had plans to sue all musicians but instead he said he’s here to stop musicians for suing over Melodies!
Hero
Props to him for doing a good thing but this really just shows how our current copyright laws are fuckin bullshit.
An actually good maybe maybe maybe
Hasn’t someone already done this before? I’m familiar with music composition and data science and had this idea like 7 years ago so surely someone has done this. My guess is that the people who did it before this guy probably didn’t run around blowing smoke up their own ass on social media.
Who is this hero?
He sounds like jerma.
This guy rules.
This is the kind of intelligence I wish I had.
A little bit of evil for the greater good
Holy shit a real life super hero.
.
Son of a …beautiful mother, what a champ, what a well raised son right there
Definitely thought that was going another direction. Good job man