[almet]

This is a mathematical approach to music, and lacks (from my point of view) what is the mere essence of music : choice.

I understand why they want to take back the copyright on music, but they do so in such a geeky way that it seems completely useless to me.

Ultimately, musicians will pick good / cool melodies from this dataset, in the same way they do when in front of an instrument.

I might be missing the point ?

[svantana]

Of course, any digitally representable artform can be enumerated this way. What's special is that melodies have low enough entropy that it's actually practical to create them all, which isn't the case with (say) movies or novels. And that low entropy is also why spurious similarities occur, as when huge pop stars are accused of plagiarising some band with 200 soundcloud followers.

[marssaxman]

The point is that applying copyright law to music leads to absurd outcomes. It is a bad idea, and ought to be abolished.

[Kye]

What do you imagine would change if musicians couldn't protect their work?

As a musician, I think what would happen is the companies that abuse copyright now would keep abusing musicians, except now they can just take any song they like without compensating the person who made it.

[ARandumGuy]

Broadly speaking, there are 3 main copyrights that apply to a given piece of music: the recording, the overall composition, and the melody. The first two are pretty uncontroversial [1]. You can't distribute my recording without my permission, and you can't make money off of a cover version without compensating me.

The melody copyright is where things get really hazy. It's hard to determine when a melody infringes on another melody. What if the notes are the same, but the timing is different? What if the notes aren't exactly the same, but are pretty similar? What if the main melodic ideas are really common in a given genre or style? How do you determine if there was actual copying, or if two musicians just came up with the same idea independently? What if the melody just isn't an important part of the style of a given work? What if the melody is almost the same, but used in a completely different musical context?

There isn't an objective set of criteria that can determine if a melody infringes on another melody, without being too narrow or too broad. And since there's no good criteria, the only way to litigate this is to have better lawyers then the other guy, which rarely works out well for independent artists.

[1] At least, uncontroversial at a high level. The details get messy really quickly.

[msla]

Can chord progressions be copyrighted?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/reggieugwu/what-the-law-says-about-...

> Copyrighted elements of a musical composition can include melody, chord progression, rhythm, and lyrics — anything that reflects a "minimal spark" of creativity and originality.

https://ask.audio/articles/5-common-beliefs-about-song-copyr...

> Song Titles and Chord Progressions are not copyright protected

> This is true.

[snip]

> Ditto for chord progressions. There must be hundreds of songs that were hits in the ’50s and early ’60s that followed the familiar “ice cream changes” progression of I-vi-IV-V7. Thin “In The Still Of The Night” (another song that shares its title with others), “Donna”, “Silhouettes”, “This Boy” just for starters. Also the chords from the “Pachelbel Canon in D” have been used numerous times. Think “A Whiter Shade Of Pale.”

Does lack of enforcement make something legal?

https://moviecultists.com/can-chord-progressions-be-copyrigh...

> "If a single chord progression were elaborate enough and unconventional enough, it could be protected."

How many possible chord progressions are there?

[Kye]

There is definitely a sizable and vocal contingent of people who want all copyright on music abolished and only consider performance a valid way to make a living as a musician. When they don't specify, like above, that's generally the meaning. I've been chastised for selling albums enough to know it's not isolated enough to ignore.

[throwaway675309]

Does the same apply to other mediums? What if I generate all possible 64x64 images? (Extend that to every resolution in theory)

[logicchop]

One row of that, two colors, has 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 permutations. Now do it for 63 more rows. Now write that to disk.

[alar44]

You can't. Even the total number of chess positions can't be stored on disk, and that's only 8x8x32.

[ahaferburg]

8x8x32=2048. Maybe you're talking about something else?

[Kye]

Probably a misunderstanding of the word position in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number

[alar44]

I mean dimensionally. 8x8 board with 32 pieces. So 8x8^32 or something like that.

[viccuad]

I found that the TED talk linked on the article explains the issue colourfully, in case you haven't watched it.