| agree with everything you stated, ESPECIALLY the last sentence. In an alternative reality where the players agreed that they were creating a creative work together, and signed the copyright to it over contractually, would your attitude change? Can you talk a little bit about why a very short riff such as 10-12 notes of this -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nLCa0YG1ZI&t=57s should be subject to copyright? (I also may be mistaken factually - perhaps it's not subject to copyright.) As you can see from that video, there really are very few choices regarding the "next note". Maybe a few more choices than the possible legal moves on a board - but not by much. >If you transcribed a chess game (mechanically) with a series of notes, it would not be. I find this very very hard to believe. If I came up with simple rules for transcribing a chess game with notes and then discovered that for a particular chess game this was pleasant, you really don't think I could copyright that tune? I'd be shocked if that were the case. |
Yes, that would probably be the same (in general) as any other work-for-hire.
> Can you talk a little bit about why a very short riff such as 10-12 notes of this [...] should be subject to copyright?
I imagine it is subject to copyright, a Haiku would be.
The grey areas here are that such a short sequence lends itself to brute-forcing which isn't creative and probably wouldn't result in a copyright, and that independent creators would each have their own copyright. You can't just generate all possible books (even if not combinatorially impossible) and block authors from writing them.
> I find this very very hard to believe. If I came up with simple rules for transcribing a chess game with notes and then discovered that for a particular chess game this was pleasant, you really don't think I could copyright that tune?
Your program to do this would be copyrightable, but it would only produce a machine-translation (by definition) of the chess game so while the end results (the tune) be copyrightable, it wouldn't be your copyright.