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Forums > Legal > Every Melody Possible Is Copyrighted And On This Hard Drive

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Well.. this is interesting..

"Songwriters are super cautious these days since plagiarism lawsuits are flying and the winner in court is usually the one you’d least suspect. One of the reasons why it’s so tough to defend a copyright lawsuit is because the court now considers a melody just a sequence of pitches, so Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin developed a program that recorded every possible melody (all 68.7 billion of them) via MIDI to a hard drive, but not for the reasons that you might think."

- from Music Industry Newsby Bobby Owsinski

Read the article..

#4105 Posted Mon 09 Mar, 2020 2:26 pm

Well.. this is interesting..

"Songwriters are super cautious these days since plagiarism lawsuits are flying and the winner in court is usually the one you’d least suspect. One of the reasons why it’s so tough to defend a copyright lawsuit is because the court now considers a melody just a sequence of pitches, so Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin developed a program that recorded every possible melody (all 68.7 billion of them) via MIDI to a hard drive, but not for the reasons that you might think."

- from Music Industry Newsby Bobby Owsinski

Read the article..

Originally posted by MonkeyC on Mon 09 Mar, 2020

That is insane!  I mean, it is great in a lot of ways, especially for us indie artists - but would that mean that I could take the same melody (as say, Celine Dion's Titanic song) and just rewrite the lyrics, and claim it 'my own' without getting in trouble? 

#4106 Posted Mon 09 Mar, 2020 2:51 pm
Just need a hard disk for all the possible lyric combinations now :)
#4107 Posted Mon 09 Mar, 2020 5:36 pm
Just need a hard disk for all the possible lyric combinations now :)

Originally posted by MonkeyC on Mon 09 Mar, 2020

Yes, I've just started on that - I've been trying to write every possible combination of different words possible - I've set 1,000 monkeys onto the task with typewriters rather than a computer but all they've done is managed to write the complete works of Shakespeare!

#4108 Posted Mon 09 Mar, 2020 6:35 pm
#4109 Posted Wed 11 Mar, 2020 2:51 pm
Great post! This is a fascinating subject. The Led Zeppelin case suggests obscurity is an important factor which means a computer-generated sequence of notes buried on a hard drive probably won't cut the mustard. That said, kudos to Damien and Noah for thinking outside the box.
#4110 Posted Wed 11 Mar, 2020 8:11 pm

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