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by roywiggins 1544 days ago
Even if you assign the copyright to a human and not a machine, you need a minimal amount of creativity to qualify for copyright, eg phone books can't be copyrighted. A "phone book" of every melody of a certain length is probably(?) not copyrightable either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....

2 comments

The linked TED talk on the article explains it nicely. A phone book is created with a finite set (numbers,letters, words in English), but that finite set can be used to produce an infinite set. You can always produce a new result by appending to previous result.

In contrast, a musical melody is created by a finite set, and is bracketed by a duration. You can't keep adding more notes to a composition without extending its duration. Doing so makes it non melodic. If you do it enough, it becomes noise (white noise, pink noise..)

No real disagreement from me - I'm just saying that there's absolutely nothing preventing you from using automation to create copywrite-able works.

People keep throwing that article around, and there seems to be a profound misunderstanding about what was determined there - automation is fine. Listing a machine as the author is not.