It is something that we are used to and that happens from time to time in the music industry , especially since the Internet began to become popular. An artist releases a song and at a certain time someone ‘discovers’ that his melody is suspiciously similar to that of another artist who created a song a while ago. Then the legal machinery begins and the lawyers of the second contact the first to claim a copyright infringement and ask for a financial amount for it.
This situation is the one that Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin have experienced on multiple occasions, the first of them a musician, programmer and copyright lawyer and the second programmer. The two have teamed up and worked to create a technology that stops musicians from stopping being sued and going to court.
This ambitious goal has led them to develop an algorithm that is capable of generating every melody that can be composed and writing each of them to a MIDI file. After all the automated creation work, they have recorded those songs and stored them on a hard drive before releasing it to the public.
Could they have been tempted to inscribe that huge amount of music and then claim copyright from anyone who used a similar tune? Yes, but they have been ‘legal’ and have released all those tunes under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. This type of license is that of “no reserved rights” . The owner of the rights would waive them and anyone who wishes can copy, modify, distribute and reproduce the works personally or commercially, without the need for attribution.
The algorithm that has been created and the melodies generated are open source and are uploaded to the Github repository so that the community can use or improve them at will.
But that is not all. They have also devised an algorithm that can record every potential melody that combines 8 notes and 12 beats and is capable of working at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second.
Music equals math
In a TED talk that Riehl gave a few months ago, the copyright lawyer said that the copyright system was “broken” and needed to be updated. “Under copyright law numbers are facts and under this law facts have fine copyright, they are almost no copyright or no copyright at all.
For the programmer “if probably those numbers had existed since the beginning of time and we had taken them out, perhaps the melodies would have been only mathematics , which are only facts, which do not have copyright”.
Will copyright lawsuits stop the duo’s algorithm and melodies? What will copyright societies think of the innovations of these two programmers? And the artists who earn millions of euros licensing their works? Will the work of Riehl and Rubin be the subject of a new fight in the courts for a song that was already registered before?
