[Retric]

Melodies are less constrained than that, timing between notes (which includes 0) note pitch and duration are all open. Which is why musical notation is really complex.

Further they are not patents two people can in theory both have copyright on the same melody.

[logicallee]

I wanted you to look at actual case law - the minimal amount of a "melody" that barred others from reusing it. Then to compare the amount of information (or constraint) in that melody, with the case at hand.

If you need a hint, see arguments e.g. here - http://gizmodo.com/5962375/is-it-possible-to-run-out-of-new-...

and elsewhere. While you say that timing between notes and note pitch and duration are all open, in fact there are relatively few choices in actual modern practice.

[Retric]

In terms of choices, high level play also has a tiny fraction of the number of choices in practice. However, this has nothing to do with why it's protected or not.

I can also make a clif notes version of Harry Potter describing what happened in detail. That's not what copywrite protects.

[logicallee]

>I can also make a clif notes version of Harry Potter describing what happened in detail. That's not what copywrite protects.

everyone can agree that summarizing a game is fine. We can also all agree that Chess games shouldn't be subject to copyright!

So, I'm not disagreeing with you or anyone.

As a very narrow technical issue, I would like to have a comparison between the number of choices (which key to play in; first note, its length; second note, its length; third note, its length; fourth note, its length) that goes into a melody that has been deemded legally protected, and a chess game.

Here is a protected riff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLCa0YG1ZI&t=57s

Now please focus on just the first 8 notes, after picking a "starting note". The number of choices for where the melody goes, in the key that is in, is rather constrained: what has more creativity, 8-9 of those notes, or an entire chess game?

An entire chess game may well have more creative choices in it. After all, full-length chess games are quite rarely repeated! (independently). There are a rather large number of variations.

As further evidence, consider the term "novelty" which is a single choice at a particular move, which has never been played before (is a new variation/line.) The term "a novelty" in chess is quite specific and also is evidence that even when you are still in the opening, Chess people consider move choices to be quite creative.

All this might seem to imply that I am disagreeing wiht you or others: I'M NOT. Chess games shoudl NOT be copyrighted.

But as a very highly technical point of law, they contain more creative choices or entropy than other creative works that are protected.

Please be more careful in your analysis.

[Retric]

First you are ignoring chords and note timing which is an option. Second there are only 1,327 named openings and variants in chess many of them are known to be inferior so you do see a lot of repition in the beginnings and endings of Master level games.

As an order of magnitude each note in a melody is from a low end estimate of ~1,000,000 completely valid options though musical style will limit this.

Thus from an encoding standpoint a chess game is theoretically a much lower entropy. But, a sufficiently constrained melody may be lower but probably not. Consider an easy example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DtvNAQ8KOqI

[logicallee]

This is totally splitting hairs and I don't think we're adding to the discussion anymore. if you'll drop me an email (see my profile, since you don't list one) I'll spit back my analysis but it's really really pedantic and actually probably not worth our time. thanks for the exchange here.