Every possible melody has just been copyrighted and released to the public domain
http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/every-melody-has-been-copyrighted-and-theyre-now-released-into-the-public-domain.htmlMaybe what the law has not considered, says Riehl, is that “since the beginning of time, the number of melodies is remarkably finite.” Rather than inventing out of whole cloth, artists choose melodies from an already extant “melodic dataset” to which everyone potentially has mental access. Now, everyone could potentially have legal access. By committing melodic data to a “tangible format,” Samantha Cole reports at Vice, “it’s considered copyrighted.” Or as Riehl explains:
Under copyright law, numbers are facts, and under copyright law, facts either have thin copyright, almost no copyright, or no copyright at all. So maybe if these numbers have existed since the beginning of time and we're just plucking them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copyrightable.
Riehl and Rubin have released their billions of melodies under a Creative Commons Zero license, meaning they have “no rights reserved” and are similar to public domain. Available as open-source downloads on Github and the Internet Archive, along with the code for the algorithm the artists used to make them, the dataset might actually have sidestepped the problem of musical copyright infringement with technology, though whether the law, writes Cole, with its “complicated and often nonsensical” application, will agree is another issue entirely.
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The algorithm works much like mp3 and other music compression algorithms do. It discards the stuff humans (in general) don't like, along with the stuff we don't notice.
Personally I think melodies are a lot like book titles. It's what you do with them that counts.
Maybe I don't think melodies are anything special because I can never get them out of my head. They just come to me. I can even bang them out on the piano, guitar, or computer. But that doesn't make me a composer or a musician.
It's like writing. Some of the saddest people on the internet spew out "ideas" for movie scripts or books they never get around to producing. They don't even get around to writing slash or other fan fiction. Nobody is going pay for that. Nobody is even going to look at it.
Oh! Oh! I have this great idea where Spock and Kirk are LOVERS!
I was witness to some of the first slash being written and posted to the internet. It's utterly astonishing to me how many people have claimed it as their own...
I also have seen bits of my own ancient software turning up. It's maybe 70% parallel evolution, and 30% deplorables.
My parents are artists. They do the hard work and sometimes get paid for it. They are now retired and can be artists full time but they always had day jobs. Same with a few of my siblings. My wife is an artist with a day job.
Copyright and patent law gets a lot right, but it gets more wrong and sometimes this impedes human progress.
I always respect copyrights but if someone is charging a price I'm not willing to pay (Apple, Microsoft...), or making demands of me I'm not willing to accept (the military-industrial complex...), then I simply avoid them.
The walls in our house our covered with art we've bought directly from artists. Our CD collection is similar. My computers run Linux.
It amuses me that some of the most pirated intellectual property on earth is crap.
