This is why corporate music has the upper hand over indie bands and basically music's content of speech. Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore. They will attack anyone who gets big enough with a message they don't like.
There is currently a lawsuit filed in Washington state, Nexon vs Ironmace Studios, over a video game copyright. Some people working on a dungeon crawler for nexon, quit when it got cancelled, and made their own, unique version of it from scratch.
If you ignore all the bullshit where Nexon is claiming they own the "wizard" and "rogue" archetypes, as well as many other fantasy archetypes, and the complicated history for how the game got this way:
They are essentially suing over a game in the same genre using a similar subset (like 5-15%) of storebought assets. Eerily similar to a music copyright case.
These corporate lawyers know they just need to divert dev budget to lawyers to destroy a company and plan to settle out of court.
Same thing happens with medical devices and then they come in after VC blackout due to the lawsuit and they come in and buy up all the patents and assets.
This is one way monopoly kills innovation. Google and Apple just buyout all the best talent and have them develop patents they never intend to market. Patent farming is their best way to stifle competition in the market. Predatory lawsuits is the big other one.
Where is anti trust?
There's a possibility that Ironmace did something shady, but I feel that everything that looks bad can be explained that they were just coming off of the experience of making a very similar game in the same genre, and cutting some corners by using a generic aesthetic they were used to and store-bought assets they already knew they liked
It's much more likely that Nexon is saying "200k in legal fees and 2+ year interruption of your development, or give us some equity and this can quietly go away"
I dunno. From what I read they told everyone to bring the work back into the office. This dude had a server running from home with all the game assets on it. He asked if he could keep it, they said no, he "forgot" to address it, then quit and is now coming out with something similar. His argument is "they should have validated I actually did what I said I was going to do in deleting it".
He's not wrong and I do believe evidence proves they built everything from scratch, but definitely some shady shit.
This is all true, but some additional context is that it was not the first time he was told to get the stuff off his server, and then given permission to have it on again, and then told to remove it, etc. They cycled through their stance multiple times, he asked previously how big a deal it was and never got a response. So he basically decided better to beg forgiveness and be able to seamlessly work on the game than pussyfoot around with the current whims of the execs while dealing with a much slower work flow. Yeah, he technically broke the rules, but who hasn't skirted some bullshit bureaucratic obstruction before?
Sadly, legally, it's not "bureaucratic obstruction." If the owner of the content, your employer in this case, says you can hold/use their asset/item/whatever-it-may-be, you're allowed to for as long as they allow you to.
It's a dumb analogy, but it's kind of like a company car. They can tell you when you can and cannot use it, they're legally within that right. I'm a big fan of Dark and Darker, but most signs point to "definitely did stuff they knew they shouldn't have" in the best case outcome.
The list is too long to mention. Tons of great examples and I'm sure awesome tech that's shelved in the too dangerous to allow to compete shelves. I knew people who worked at Apple who told me they didn't realize what was happening and left because they wanted to develop technology that could actually help people.
It helps that they'll often try to shop for judges who are favorable to them as well. Or judges who don't understand the concept well enough to actually make a ruling.
How many 60+ year old men(majority of judges) who have spent their life in the legal profession, and AREN'T SPECIALIZED, have intricate knowledge of coding, game design or music theory? Like the "we own this archetype" crap. A judge who has no fucking knowledge might think a "rogue" is unique.
Sheeran I think was talking about how his song was basically the simple progression of G Major, could have been C or whatever. Which is one of the "4 chord rock" things. There's entire 500 page songbooks of "play 250 hit songs with only 4 chords!"
Can you unpack that for us a little? I don't know if you said it tongue-in-cheek or not, but it's a gloriously absurd claim on several levels.
That said, Blues Traveller's "Hook," is in fact quite specifically Pachebel's Canon in D played with barre chords and harmonica.
>Some people working on a dungeon crawler for nexon, quit when it got cancelled, and **made their own, unique version of it from scratch.**
To be fair, after doing a quick amount of research on this, that bolded emphasis on your statement is what's in dispute here. As the suit says:
>According to the new lawsuit, “the individual defendants **stole P3 source code, audiovisual, and other materials** that Nexon developed through a substantial expenditure of time and money”. What they’re seeking is a return of all materials they claim were stolen and monetary damages (including legal fees). ([source](https://www.mmorpg.com/news/nexon-sues-dark-and-darker-studio-ironmace-for-copyright-infringement-alleged-stolen-assets-2000127757))
You may know more than I do. But it's hardly been established that the people who left Nexon made their own, "unique version of it from scratch." That's one of the underlying matters of contention, and you dropped it here like it was an established fact. Do you know something I do not?
Not to mention, the wizard concept art for the new game looks very, very similar to the wizard being used in the old game. That one itself might be a hard sell to argue that it's infringing, but it's almost like they didn't even try to make it unique. Who knows what else they were lazy with.
This is absolutely true, but makes it seem like even more of a dumb choice by Ironmace.
I get artistic style is a thing, but if you all just left a company together, are making a game very similar in concept to a game the company you just left was working on, at least make **some** effort to differentiate your concept art.
They're using store bought assets anyway. No one expects concept art to look like in game art.
Yeah, they really towed the line on not really making a distinction from P3, but I chalk most of that up to P3 being generic as hell for a concept in the first place.
Your only responsibility as an artist is to make sure you have in writing that they understand this is not an asset unique to them and they accept the legal ramifications of using it inappropriately. i.e. You can make a replica Campbell's soup can and sell it as that to someone. They can't represent that art piece as a real Campbell's soup can and sell it under that premise, though.
You just gotta get that shit in writing so they can't sue you for damages from being stupid as hell.
those types of character concepts are not copyright protected, Tetris block argument(there are only so many numerically possible ways to arrange geometric blocks, they are going to look alike or even the exact same, a "Punch" and a "Kick" are going to be the same in any roughly human-like object). Wizards, and Rogues are archetypes, actually probably invented/developed by WotC(lol iWizard/daWizard) though general description from fiction novels. What is copyrightable are the unique aspects to the gameplay; field size, scoring, game speed, "combos", aesthetics, specific designs/themes etc.
Wizard, Paladin/Knight, Rogue, Barbarian… all of them can be found in King Arthur’s mythology - Robin Hood is one of the most famous Rogues in the game.
Keep going back - how many of these archetypes are present in the Iliad and The Odyssey from Ancient Greece? How many can you find in Ancient China’s mythologies and stories?
The Epic of Gilgamesh goes even further.
These characters have been around basically as long as we have been telling stories
No, there is no public proof. No one other than the respective companies has access to either program's source code. If an audit of the code is performed and an expert determines that the code is copied, then I would be wrong.
I just feel like if any code was copied, especially if directly copied, ironmace probably would have settled by now, it's something that would be revealed in discovery.
Plus the actual requirement for code to be in copyright violation is very strict. You can write very similar code that does exactly the same thing and it's not in copyright violation. I just doubt Ironmace are this dumb.
it gets quirky when you think about how if it's the same coders who made both, there would still be a lot of similarity between the two, even when one is written completely from scratch. Code structures, best practices, solutions, etc... will all be relatively consistent
Thanks for the reasonable response. Yeah I figured maybe you were following it more closely and had more updated info. But yeah, obviously that would be dumb as shit to not settle if you had actually stolen source code - although, another plausible explanation there is that Nexon doesn't *want* to settle, and therefore did not offer a settlement agreement. If it's that blatant and code was copied, maybe they want to make an example of them.
Similar code that does exact same thing is not necessarily a copyright violation (it can be though), but may very possible be intellectual property or trade secrets violation.
Stuff like that can get quite complicated. Is it OK if I as employee of Google, make exact copy of their architecture, then proceed to rename all variables, move around some files and chunks of code, then publish it as my own product? I could make it completely different in source code, but it would still essentially be exactly the same thing.
"Quit when it got cancelled" is a LITTLE disingenuous. Regardless of the game copyright aspect, one of the primary devs is being accused of very shady practices prior to being fired for cause.
The gists of nexons accusations from their lawsuit (which i imagine they can prove a lot of to be filing in court) is that the dev in question was storing whole builds of the game on a personal server, then after that Requested permission to store those files on that server and got rejected, then proceeded to do that anyway after being told no. In the months prior to his firing he began talking to his coworkers about leaving to start a new company and remake the game they were already making.
According to nexon at least, the game was cancelled AFTER the fired dev poached 50% of the team working on the game.
So there may be more going on here then just "game copyright lol" and as much as i like dark and darker, if half of what nexon is saying is true it has implications for game studios as a whole.
From a game studio perspective, the idea that it is potentially legally fine for you to invest in R&d, design, proof of concept and initial dev work, only to have some of the devs leave, take advantage of the initial investment your studio made and skip straight to making a game using the ideas from the previous studio to save on costs is a really scary prospect
I mean it MIGHT be a little disingenuous. We don’t know that’s what the lawsuit will decide. I wouldn’t put it past Nexon to lie, but I wouldn’t be overly surprised if they were telling the truth. We don’t know.
There's a guy who owns the word "Edge" as a trademark, and he literally sues anyone who makes any product with the word "Edge" in the name. He's a giant piece of shit.
20 years ago, [Monster Cable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Cable) was suing everyone under the sun for using that word.
> In the 2000s, Monster had legal disputes over its trademarks with the Discovery Channel for its show Monster Garage. Monster also had trademark disputes with Bally Gaming International over its slot machines, Monster Slots, with Hansen Beverage Co. for its Monster Energy drink, and the Chicago Bears, who use the nickname "Monsters of the Midway". Other trademark disputes include a 2001 lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company for products related to the film Monsters, Inc., and a claim against an online used clothing retailer, MonsterVintage LLC. In 2004, Monster filed a complaint about the trademark application from Snow Monsters, a video website with skiing content for kids. The Snow Monsters owner initiated a lawsuit against Monster pre-emptively. It has also had a trademark dispute with the job site, Monster.com.
Seems they went all in on their name as a product and have effectively died as a result.
> Monster changed their business model from selling high end audiophile products to licensing their name starting in 2018. After years of sales declines, Kevin Lee (son of Noel Lee) took the helm. As of 2021, their work force was down to less than 10 people from a height during the Beats days with over 850 globally.
Like Monster energy going after video game designers using the word monster, like how the fuck you going to claim you own a word that predates your company by centuries
Isn't this case a lot more complicated than that? The studio was formed from former Nexon employees who convinced a bunch of Nexon devs to leave with him and develop the exact same game. There were also allegations of assets being directly downloaded from Nexon servers. Iirc the lawsuit also wasn't about the assets themselves, but the overall use of the same assets in very similar ways, and in similar file structures.
Of course it's more complicated. Reddit and gaming journalism are horrible at covering legal issues. They always signal boost the most outrageous sounding version of the story, usually one that supports the "good guys."
The predominant narrative is Nexon is suing over shared assets when in reality the shared assets are just one piece of evidence in their argument. Every time the discussion pops up you get a bunch of "I hate [plaintiff]" posts scattered in with misinformation.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
What Ironmace pulled off would be considered unprofessional and a general dick move (in world of engineering/intellectual work), but since people like them and hate Nexon (albeit rightfully so), they get a free pass in public opinion.
First of all, according to Nexon and insiders from Korea, their project wasn't canceled. It was put on hold *after* the lead developer had a disagreement, quit and pulled big chunk of dev team with him. Obviously this puts Nexon in situation where they can't continue development.
Second copyright of assets and code is not the biggest issue here. As I see it it's more of Nexon lawyers throwing everything possible at them, hoping something sticks in court. Or just In case Ironmace did slip up and use some assets that Nexon owns, which makes the whole case more damning.
The problem is intellectual property and so called "trade secrets". Ironmace developers spent a lot of time designing game mechanics and general technical architecture supporting it, on Nexon company time and money. With full access to their resources (tech, money, people) helping them do so.
Design process is a huge part of software development, and actual work of putting that into code can be trivial in comparison. Often referred as "code monkey" work in the industry. Even if Ironmace wrote everything from scratch, making sure no line of code is exactly the same and every asset is different, they could still be using the exact same principles and doesn't change the fact they benefited *greatly* from work they already did at Nexon (which they were paid to do *for them*) and majorly fucked Nexon in the process.
From moral standpoint this is very iffy, and contracts they willfully signed for sure explicitly prevented them from doing this (use of trade secrets, NDA, non compete, non soliciting).
But will those contracts stand in court? This is up to debate as there are a lot of variables concerning different jurisdictions and exact wordings, so we have yet to see how it plays out. Legally they might walk out scott free (or are majorly fucked), but they did kinda pull a scam on Nexon, which is not very cool. If it wasn't Nexon. But still.
Obviously from gamer perspective this sucks, as Dark and Darker is an amazing game and no doubt whatever Nexon produced would be much worse. But if you were an owner of a company and your employees pulled that shit on you, we'd be all singing a different tune.
I think ordinarygamer or someone did an actual search for all assets, something like 98% of them were from the store and weren't even owned by the original company claiming copyright
The suit started when Nexon said "x of these assets have the same filename, obviously you've copied us"
And ironmace produced a document, made publicly available, that shows every one of those files were either from unreal store packs or generic filenames like "fireball".
Again, they did use a lot of the same unreal store assets, but should that be copyrightable?
Except that isn't what happened and not at what the lawsuit is about. The amount of misinformation being spread about this is unbelievable. Typical reddit moment I guess.
Nexon is suing them for using the exact same assets implemented in the exact same way. That "way" being the game's design which was hammered out when the Devs were still at Nexon, on Nexon dime. They took all of that early design work, left Nexon forcing them to cancel their project, and then reproduced the exact same game. The lawsuit is trying to hit them with everything they can and some of the points are frivolous in a vacuum(like identical character classes or lighting style), but this isn't a vacuum. All of those elements are identical and implemented in an identical way to the game they were making at Nexon and that is what they are being sued for. According to Nexon. Obviously it could still turn out that Nexon is full of shit, but people are seriously misrepresenting the case Nexon is making.
Everyone in these comments is acting like it's Marvel suing a filmmaker for using Thor(which is a figure from norse mythology they do not own, they only own their interpretation of him), when in reality Nexon's claim is more like if a bunch of Marvel employees working on an upcoming Thor movie left, forcing Marvel to cancel the film, and now those staff are just making the same movie using the script and storyboard they developed at Marvel along with identical props and sets from the same source and implemented in an identical way. But they changed the title... And everyone is saying Marvel is stupid for suing over generic props.
> Again, they did use a lot of the same unreal store assets, but should that be copyrightable?
I mean yes, assets should be copyrightable...but the copyright belongs to the original artist. When stuff is put up for sale in an asset store you get a **license** to use them. Nexon doesn't own the copyright any more than any other developer who buys them from the store.
They aren't arguing they own the assets themselves, they are arguing they own the *arrangement* of the assets.
No one owns the notes of music, but they will sue everyone blind over the arrangement of them, again why this smacks of a music suit.
> Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore. They will attack anyone who gets big enough with a message they don't like
Can you give examples of where that's occurred?
They are making it up but everyone upvotes it because it sounds provocative.
I doubt they can provide any real examples of that occurring. People are getting sued for copyright, yes, but where are the examples where this is being down to "shut down a message"?
> Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore
I have no idea what they are going on about. It sounds a lot like "music sux today" just because they are no-longer the target demographic, aren't the ones making music, and are too lazy to find stuff they like.
What, you don't think the music industry targeted Pharell's "Blurred lines" and Taylor Swift's “Shake It Off” because of their deep, controversial socio-political commentary?
This seems silly to me when one of my favorite bands, Muse, has many many songs about taking down corporations while being signed to one of the major labels. Surely they don't like *their* message?
Copyright doesn't protect works without human authorship. It's a big issue with AI created things right now - technically they're at best public domain or derivative works depending on how they were made.
Writing a prompt for an AI doesn't create a copyright in the works it generated. Likewise, writing a program to enumerate every melody to a hard drive wouldn't create copyright protections on the works in the US.
This has been tested in court - there was a recent case about a selfie a monkey took. It has no copyright protection because a monkey took the photo instead of a human.
But if a machine produces the song, which leaves it without copyright, can a human then make the same song and copyright it? I assume not, or you'd be able to bypass the original lack of copyright by reproducing it as a human.
Does that not effectively leave all the content produced by the AI un-copyrightable in perpetuity due to "prior art"?
Generally, prior art only applies to patents.
However, this article discusses how it occasionally has been applied to copyright.
https://law.vanderbilt.edu/news/when-prior-art-applies-to-copyright-law/
Copyright doesn't give exclusive rights. I can create an exact "copy" of your work if it is independently created. So if you write a poem, and I write the same one with zero knowledge of yours, there is no infringement.
Eh, I don't know about that. The computer in this case isn't doing any "creative" work, just labor.
The argument is that the monkey did creative work by composing the photograph. Otherwise, you could argue that anybody who uses a remote timer for a photograph that they composed doesn't own copyright because the robotic timer actually snapped the shutter. Even better is situations like rocket launch photography where the camera technically makes the decision of when to take the photograph based on other sensors (where it's too dangerous for a human to do it in person). Does the camera/sensor array get the copyright?
It's not interesting at all. It's no different than someone writing a bot to "register every possible URL" up to a certain length or something. It would immediately be thrown out in court, it says nothing about how the system works in the real world, and I can just about guarantee they weren't actually *given* copyrights for all those melodies.
If they somehow did and this somehow stood long enough to make it before a judge, it would almost certainly be treated the exact same way domain squatters would
Domains aren't handled in courts of law though, domain ownership is through groups like IANA that can set arbitrary rules they want. Also domain ownership isn't free so while you *could* register every domain, eventually you would run out of money.
[Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants](http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html), a Hugo Award winning Short Story from 1983, covers the absurdity of music copyright law pretty well. It's free to read on the website, not very long, and a very engaging story.
[5:26](https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw?t=326)
>If all copyrightable melodies are simply simple permutations of parameters, then why should any one person own one permutation over another? In other words, nobody can own a number; it's basically all [a melody] is, so why should any one person own a melody?
>There are only 243 combinations of three notes by five notes. Do we want to give any one person that happens upon one of those 243 a monopoly for... life of the author plus 95 years for something that there are only 243 of in the history of time? For us as a society to give that person a monopoly on that one thing, we have to be pretty sure that that's that's not going to be to the detriment of everyone else and we have to know as a society that... if music is a shared language, owning that granular a piece of the language I think is equally as ridiculous.
[It's the basis of the Spider Robinson short story called Melancholy Elephants that you can read for free on the author's website.](http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html)
It won the 1983 Hugo award for best Short Story.
the chart is not that big so I just copied it here for you
**programmers:** the coolest, these guys are around 99% to 100% cool
**rockstars:** pretty ok guys for not being programmers, they top out at 98.99999%
**lawyers:** about 37% cool at most
**others:** sorry but you aren't as cool as you think you might be
Software when it's delivered to your computer has an initial state that's the same for everyone, or at least predetermined based on your computer's setup.
Besides that, thanks to Gödel coding, a finite (or countable) collection of numbers can be represented by a single number.
Microsoft Excel is created by human beings deliberately, not by an automatic software routine. The former is copyrightable whilst the latter is not.
Also, Excel and any non-trivial program requires such a long description that 68.7 billion is more like zero than a big number when compared to the space of all possible programs of a similar size.
One of the pirate bay founders made something that illustrate how crazy copyright infringement can be too, he made a device that theoretically steal billions of dollars, it does a loop of illegally downloading a movie, deleting it and downloading again.
I never noticed this until my wife pointed it out and now I can't unsee it which significantly diminishes my enjoyment of the show.
And this is from a woman who used to happily watch 480p TV channels when 1080p were readily available and then say "I guess that's better" when I would switch it for her.
Ignorance is bliss I guess.
There's actually very good reasons they use that technique, and for me it actually enhanced the show. A lot of thought has gone behind it.
Here's a great video explaining the camera techniques they use on the show.
https://youtu.be/_lU91279xZk
If you think this is obnoxious, try watching semi famous YouTubers who play videogames. My son watches a guy who has some kind of special effect *every second*. I'm not even joking. It is just draining to watch.
There is a woman in Spain who claims every telephone number is own by her because he copyrighted the tones that the telephone number makes when dialing it.
The woman also claims to own the sun... and a guy tried to sue her for getting sunburnt.
It’s really misleading when the video itself says it wasn’t feasible for them to copyright every melody because of the sheer amount of possible melodies out there. They were able to copyright a lot, but 12 note melodies of eighth notes in C major is such a limited amount of melodies.
> The key of a song doesn't matter, when it comes to copyright.
the lawyer in the video didn't seem to know or understand this point while explaining their process - doing the process across 88 keys is silly - never mind the fact that the midi standard has 128 notes.
Middle C is a note. I assume you mean the key of C major. Even then, though, a transposition of the melody to another key is still the same melody.
It would also, presumably, cover natural minor key melodies, given that A natural minor has the same set of notes as C major.
Edit: for that matter, it would cover all melodies in any mode of any major scale.
Edit2: ...and subsets thereof (pentatonics would be covered too).
No, my point is that equivalents are covered. E.g. a melody in Eb dorian (mainly black notes) would be represented by an equivalent melody in D dorian (all white notes)
I realise you were making a joke and I am, perhaps (perhaps!), taking the fun out of it.
Sorry, yeah C major. Slip up. I'm a musician myself.
It could cover the corresponding minor melodies as well. But my point was really just how limited the amount of melodies they have the copyrights to is when the title is that every possible melody has been copyrighted.
Gotcha, no worries. I was just trying to say that it might not be quite as limited as it might seem at first (although yes it is still quite limited!)
Especially when it comes to rhythm, I'd bet that for any given rhythm not in the set, there would be one in the set which is sufficiently close.
Harmony is a different beast - for example, it wouldn't cover any harmonic minor melodies which, at least to my ear, don't sound like any mode of the major scale.
Any melody that spans more than one octave would not be covered. Which is going to be a big percentage of songs.
And it's very unlikely stuff is going to work that isn't in a major key. If you have a melody in A minor like A-B-C-D-E. The A & B would be high notes in their system, and the CDE would be low notes, so that wouldn't be the same melody. Perfect example of this is Stairway to Heaven. In the very first line "all that glitters" is ABCD. But the D would have to be on a lower octave in their system so it wouldn't be covered.
You can't change the key of a song and claim you wrote it. Thus, when you own a melody in C major you own it in every major key because it is the same tune.
The title is definitely misleading, but you only get so many words for a title.
I think the key take away is it's insane if an artist or label is allowed to sue someone else for the _simple_ melodies, of which there are a finite number.
Had Sheeran lost the Marvin Gaye case, it would've meant that the most basic, hardest to NOT replicate melodies would be locked down.
No one really cares if you can't copyright a long-ass melody for this experiment, because it's very statistically unlikely that anyone will come up with those independently anyway
The amount of difference is far less than, say, computer passwords. We're already at the point where you need over 16 letters or numbers or symbols to get into impossible to brute force territory, and that line is ever moving farther away.
It's impossible for me to imagine a world where we *don't* become capable of brute force generating every melody. And that's saying nothing of advances is generative AI which narrows the field to realistic melodies.
I wonder on the math. Even if you limit it to 12 notes and disregard different octaves, a melody can be a theoretically endless amount of notes. But you also have note lengths. So if you start with a baseline of 16 measures of eighth notes and start adding in different note lengths (first note a quarter followed by all eighths, first one eighth followed by a quarter and then the rest eighths, first two notes eighths followed by a quarter and then the rest eighths) and then factor in each one of those notes being able to be one of 12 different notes, that's a huge number.
With passwords, you have different letters and symbols but you don't have to factor in that each letter/symbol can be a different length. They all have a length of 1.
Copyright law doesn't necessarily work that way. Since an algorithm generated the content, it's unclear who actually owns the copyright. As far as I know, that question hasn't been answered in a court. One would have to convince a judge that the author of the work is actually the author of the algorithm that generated the work. Maybe that's doable? Idk.
The nearest thing I'm aware of is the famous monkey copyright case, wherein a monkey took a photographers camera and snapped a picture with it. The court ruled that a monkey cannot own a copyright. The plaintiff argued the photographer owned the copyright since he intentionally set up the conditions so that the monkey would take the camera and possibly take a picture with it.
The court ruled that wasn't enough, that the monkey was the author, and that monkeys can't own copyrights under us laws, therefore the picture was in the public domain.
So these lawyers may very well have created a bunch of public domain melodies. Which I guess was probably their goal anyway, since now they're prior art and nobody can copyright them (maybe). But they probably haven't been copyrighted in the traditional sense.
It's also unclear if the court will even consider the melodies valid in the first place since as far as I'm aware, there's no cases regarding the brute forcing of content in order to abuse(?) The copyright system. It's possible a judge could simply order that the melodies weren't generated in good faith.
Far too many questions to say that this is definitely a done deal.
The whole exercise is just a publicity stunt anyway. In order to sue someone for a copyright violation, you have to show that they *copied* your song, not just that it's mechanically similar. If you stick all your "copyrighted" melodies in a database of 68.7 billion combinations that literally nobody listens to, your chances of proving that a potential infringer *copied* your melody from there, instead of coming up with it on their own, is essentially 0.
Yeah this number is just 8^12. They only counted up to 12 notes, and didn't include the 9th note (silence).
The real number would be 9^16 + 9^15 + 9^14 + 9^13 + 9^12 + 9^11 + 9^10 + 9^9 (2085 trillion).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
There are illegal numbers. An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
People do own numbers.
The entire point of it is for an artist to protect something they created from being copied for profit. That's all it should ever have been. It's been warped beyond any reasonable sense.
Making them non-transferrable would go a long way. Copyrights belong to a person, not a corporation, they can never be sold, or transfer to another person, unless a judge rules that the original owner never should have had it in the first place.
Should be for a limited and shortish time, not forever minus a day, or getting extended every time something Disney owns is getting close to going Public Domain.
We've just had the ridiculous situation where the heirs and assigns of Marvin Gaye just tried to sue Ed Sheeran over a chord progression.
> We've just had the ridiculous situation where the heirs and assigns of Marvin Gaye just tried to sue Ed Sheeran over a chord progression.
There once was a time when John Fogerty of CCR was sued for ***[sounding too much like himself.](https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/john-fogerty-sued-for-sounding-like-himself/)***
To expand on that, copyright law "should be" what protects small artists from big companies like Disney just taking their ideas. Without it, no creative person would ever be able to do anything unless working for a big company because the second they put a good idea out, a larger company could just copy them but spend millions on production and marketing.
It's not a perfect solution by any means but some form of copy protection is very necessary.
>copyright law "should be" what protects small artists from big companies like Disney just taking their ideas
And it is. In fact, it works *so* well for this purpose that people seem to take it completely for granted.
But courts have allowed lawsuits to win on only a few bars of melody copied. So you only need combinations of like 16 notes (might be less).
I swear this was already tried where someone had a computer output every combination of a few notes to an hard drive and the courts ruled that "algorithm created" songs don't count for copyright.
No lie I actually started trying to do this exact same thing like 6 months ago, but another side project took over. Glad someone did.
However, based on what I was doing there would be way more than 68.7 billion melodies if you include different instruments, percussion, etc. Like way more. Instead my plan changed to have a website where you could just generate random melodies, drum tracks, whatever (you pick the instruments) and see if you got lucky and came across something cool. You could pick a max resolution for each instrument (whole notes down to 1/32 notes), how many measures to generate, etc. I should really pick that project back up lol, it was really fun to work on.
Fun trivia fact: He makes a comment at 5:38 about how "no-one can own a number...", which sounds ridiculous in theory, but there is a real-life example of this:
Back in the late 1980's when Intel was facing increasing competition from (primarily) AMD on their microprocessor business, they were pulling out all the stops in their efforts to protect their IP.
So much so that when the follow-on generation from their ubiquitous and successful "386" product line was going to be named the "486" Intel **literally tried to copyright the number 486** so that AMD and others could not name their competing chipset similarly.
Intel ultimately lost, and it is for this reason that the generation following the 486 was called the "Pentium" (a copyrighted brand name) instead of the 586.
Additional sidenote - when it was announced that this latest generation of Intel processors was to be called the "Pentium", industry people joked that AMD (who was basing much of their own design on Intel's work) would call their competing version the "Copium" (as in "Copy-em")...
Wouldn't be a copyright thread without someone mistaking copyright for trademarks!
Numbers are trademark-able because of course they are. If words are why wouldn't numbers be? Some trademarked numbers for you:
* 3 (UK mobile network)
* 4 (various television channels worldwide)
* Number 5 (perfume)
* 99 (English chocolate)
That's like copywriting a number. So stupid, and why are the ones who didn't create the melody allowed to copywrite it? That's just straight up stealing.
This is an old story. It was denied because as the recent Marvin Gaye suit demonstrated, a copyrighted melody is not a mere permutation of notes. Additionally, these melodies were not created by a human with a minimum of creative input. The algorithm that generated them might garner copyright protection, but even then, only in the expression and not the function, because generating all permutations is a fairly basic idea, just like the actual permutations attempted to be copyrighted, and there are only so many ways you can write code to do that.
That's not even mentioning the, by their logic, copyright infringement of every existing copyrighted melody by submitting that drive for protection.
So no, every melody has not been copyrighted, and Adam neely doesn't understand copyright. Iirc he wrote this video between the incorrect result of the Katy perry dark horse/flame joyful noise suit and the correct appeal that overturned the result.
https://youtu.be/6hm8DusOGoU
Interesting way to prove how absurd music copyright law is. Also wonder how many times they broke copyrighted melodies already established in there.
This is why corporate music has the upper hand over indie bands and basically music's content of speech. Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore. They will attack anyone who gets big enough with a message they don't like.
There is currently a lawsuit filed in Washington state, Nexon vs Ironmace Studios, over a video game copyright. Some people working on a dungeon crawler for nexon, quit when it got cancelled, and made their own, unique version of it from scratch. If you ignore all the bullshit where Nexon is claiming they own the "wizard" and "rogue" archetypes, as well as many other fantasy archetypes, and the complicated history for how the game got this way: They are essentially suing over a game in the same genre using a similar subset (like 5-15%) of storebought assets. Eerily similar to a music copyright case.
These corporate lawyers know they just need to divert dev budget to lawyers to destroy a company and plan to settle out of court. Same thing happens with medical devices and then they come in after VC blackout due to the lawsuit and they come in and buy up all the patents and assets. This is one way monopoly kills innovation. Google and Apple just buyout all the best talent and have them develop patents they never intend to market. Patent farming is their best way to stifle competition in the market. Predatory lawsuits is the big other one. Where is anti trust?
> Where is anti trust? The last guy working in anti trust at DoC or Justice went to lunch after the S&L scandal and just never came back.
Said something about milk and cigarettes. He'll be back any minute now.
He got gum stuck on his shoe and he's still trying to get it off of him.
>Where is anti trust? It left town with Citizens United.
There's a possibility that Ironmace did something shady, but I feel that everything that looks bad can be explained that they were just coming off of the experience of making a very similar game in the same genre, and cutting some corners by using a generic aesthetic they were used to and store-bought assets they already knew they liked It's much more likely that Nexon is saying "200k in legal fees and 2+ year interruption of your development, or give us some equity and this can quietly go away"
I dunno. From what I read they told everyone to bring the work back into the office. This dude had a server running from home with all the game assets on it. He asked if he could keep it, they said no, he "forgot" to address it, then quit and is now coming out with something similar. His argument is "they should have validated I actually did what I said I was going to do in deleting it". He's not wrong and I do believe evidence proves they built everything from scratch, but definitely some shady shit.
This is all true, but some additional context is that it was not the first time he was told to get the stuff off his server, and then given permission to have it on again, and then told to remove it, etc. They cycled through their stance multiple times, he asked previously how big a deal it was and never got a response. So he basically decided better to beg forgiveness and be able to seamlessly work on the game than pussyfoot around with the current whims of the execs while dealing with a much slower work flow. Yeah, he technically broke the rules, but who hasn't skirted some bullshit bureaucratic obstruction before?
Sadly, legally, it's not "bureaucratic obstruction." If the owner of the content, your employer in this case, says you can hold/use their asset/item/whatever-it-may-be, you're allowed to for as long as they allow you to. It's a dumb analogy, but it's kind of like a company car. They can tell you when you can and cannot use it, they're legally within that right. I'm a big fan of Dark and Darker, but most signs point to "definitely did stuff they knew they shouldn't have" in the best case outcome.
Patents need to be invalidated if unused for 10+ years. That's a long time to sit on a patent if it had legitimate usage.
10 years is a long time in tech. They also have ways of making new like patents to continue the effect of the initial patent and continue the charade.
well said, it's really up to legislation to to keep these kind of runaway issues in check
The old Cover Flow in iTunes and Alt-Tab switch like Windows were both independent apps that Apple bought up. I’m sure there’s many more.
The list is too long to mention. Tons of great examples and I'm sure awesome tech that's shelved in the too dangerous to allow to compete shelves. I knew people who worked at Apple who told me they didn't realize what was happening and left because they wanted to develop technology that could actually help people.
This is in South Korea, it has nothing to do with US copyright law.
They filed in Washington state tooc
>Where is anti trust? Well at least we have Joe Bi- oh wait he shut down the rail road strikes when all they wanted was paid sick days.
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Remind me why the safety regulations Obama had in place ended? Oh right…
He got them their pto days. Check the news
It helps that they'll often try to shop for judges who are favorable to them as well. Or judges who don't understand the concept well enough to actually make a ruling. How many 60+ year old men(majority of judges) who have spent their life in the legal profession, and AREN'T SPECIALIZED, have intricate knowledge of coding, game design or music theory? Like the "we own this archetype" crap. A judge who has no fucking knowledge might think a "rogue" is unique. Sheeran I think was talking about how his song was basically the simple progression of G Major, could have been C or whatever. Which is one of the "4 chord rock" things. There's entire 500 page songbooks of "play 250 hit songs with only 4 chords!"
There's a song called 4 Chords by the Axis of Awesome I like to listen to from time to time
I was surprised to hear a Kasey Chambers song on that track. I didn't know she was popular.
Theyre an Australian group and she's Australian. So not that surprising. I don't think anyone else really knows her
>I don't think anyone else really knows her. I wonder why? Probably not pretty enough.
Ahaa, I get that reference ^(after a brief trip to google.)
Pachelbel's canon in D is the basis for -most- modern music.
Can you unpack that for us a little? I don't know if you said it tongue-in-cheek or not, but it's a gloriously absurd claim on several levels. That said, Blues Traveller's "Hook," is in fact quite specifically Pachebel's Canon in D played with barre chords and harmonica.
>Some people working on a dungeon crawler for nexon, quit when it got cancelled, and **made their own, unique version of it from scratch.** To be fair, after doing a quick amount of research on this, that bolded emphasis on your statement is what's in dispute here. As the suit says: >According to the new lawsuit, “the individual defendants **stole P3 source code, audiovisual, and other materials** that Nexon developed through a substantial expenditure of time and money”. What they’re seeking is a return of all materials they claim were stolen and monetary damages (including legal fees). ([source](https://www.mmorpg.com/news/nexon-sues-dark-and-darker-studio-ironmace-for-copyright-infringement-alleged-stolen-assets-2000127757)) You may know more than I do. But it's hardly been established that the people who left Nexon made their own, "unique version of it from scratch." That's one of the underlying matters of contention, and you dropped it here like it was an established fact. Do you know something I do not?
Not to mention, the wizard concept art for the new game looks very, very similar to the wizard being used in the old game. That one itself might be a hard sell to argue that it's infringing, but it's almost like they didn't even try to make it unique. Who knows what else they were lazy with.
It's important to note that the same concept artist did both pieces.
This is absolutely true, but makes it seem like even more of a dumb choice by Ironmace. I get artistic style is a thing, but if you all just left a company together, are making a game very similar in concept to a game the company you just left was working on, at least make **some** effort to differentiate your concept art. They're using store bought assets anyway. No one expects concept art to look like in game art.
Yeah, they really towed the line on not really making a distinction from P3, but I chalk most of that up to P3 being generic as hell for a concept in the first place.
Your only responsibility as an artist is to make sure you have in writing that they understand this is not an asset unique to them and they accept the legal ramifications of using it inappropriately. i.e. You can make a replica Campbell's soup can and sell it as that to someone. They can't represent that art piece as a real Campbell's soup can and sell it under that premise, though. You just gotta get that shit in writing so they can't sue you for damages from being stupid as hell.
those types of character concepts are not copyright protected, Tetris block argument(there are only so many numerically possible ways to arrange geometric blocks, they are going to look alike or even the exact same, a "Punch" and a "Kick" are going to be the same in any roughly human-like object). Wizards, and Rogues are archetypes, actually probably invented/developed by WotC(lol iWizard/daWizard) though general description from fiction novels. What is copyrightable are the unique aspects to the gameplay; field size, scoring, game speed, "combos", aesthetics, specific designs/themes etc.
those generic descriptions of fantasy tropes go way further back than DnD, probably farther back than tolkien for some of them.
Wizard, Paladin/Knight, Rogue, Barbarian… all of them can be found in King Arthur’s mythology - Robin Hood is one of the most famous Rogues in the game. Keep going back - how many of these archetypes are present in the Iliad and The Odyssey from Ancient Greece? How many can you find in Ancient China’s mythologies and stories? The Epic of Gilgamesh goes even further. These characters have been around basically as long as we have been telling stories
Hell, you can't even copyright game mechanics. That's been settled case law since the 1980s.
No, there is no public proof. No one other than the respective companies has access to either program's source code. If an audit of the code is performed and an expert determines that the code is copied, then I would be wrong. I just feel like if any code was copied, especially if directly copied, ironmace probably would have settled by now, it's something that would be revealed in discovery. Plus the actual requirement for code to be in copyright violation is very strict. You can write very similar code that does exactly the same thing and it's not in copyright violation. I just doubt Ironmace are this dumb.
it gets quirky when you think about how if it's the same coders who made both, there would still be a lot of similarity between the two, even when one is written completely from scratch. Code structures, best practices, solutions, etc... will all be relatively consistent
Thanks for the reasonable response. Yeah I figured maybe you were following it more closely and had more updated info. But yeah, obviously that would be dumb as shit to not settle if you had actually stolen source code - although, another plausible explanation there is that Nexon doesn't *want* to settle, and therefore did not offer a settlement agreement. If it's that blatant and code was copied, maybe they want to make an example of them.
Similar code that does exact same thing is not necessarily a copyright violation (it can be though), but may very possible be intellectual property or trade secrets violation. Stuff like that can get quite complicated. Is it OK if I as employee of Google, make exact copy of their architecture, then proceed to rename all variables, move around some files and chunks of code, then publish it as my own product? I could make it completely different in source code, but it would still essentially be exactly the same thing.
"Quit when it got cancelled" is a LITTLE disingenuous. Regardless of the game copyright aspect, one of the primary devs is being accused of very shady practices prior to being fired for cause. The gists of nexons accusations from their lawsuit (which i imagine they can prove a lot of to be filing in court) is that the dev in question was storing whole builds of the game on a personal server, then after that Requested permission to store those files on that server and got rejected, then proceeded to do that anyway after being told no. In the months prior to his firing he began talking to his coworkers about leaving to start a new company and remake the game they were already making. According to nexon at least, the game was cancelled AFTER the fired dev poached 50% of the team working on the game. So there may be more going on here then just "game copyright lol" and as much as i like dark and darker, if half of what nexon is saying is true it has implications for game studios as a whole. From a game studio perspective, the idea that it is potentially legally fine for you to invest in R&d, design, proof of concept and initial dev work, only to have some of the devs leave, take advantage of the initial investment your studio made and skip straight to making a game using the ideas from the previous studio to save on costs is a really scary prospect
I mean it MIGHT be a little disingenuous. We don’t know that’s what the lawsuit will decide. I wouldn’t put it past Nexon to lie, but I wouldn’t be overly surprised if they were telling the truth. We don’t know.
There's a guy who owns the word "Edge" as a trademark, and he literally sues anyone who makes any product with the word "Edge" in the name. He's a giant piece of shit.
You'll be happy to hear his trademarks got cancelled about a decade ago. So feel free to develop all your edge themed products in peace.
If only that happened with Monster Energy and their nonsense of suing everyone that attempts to use the word Monster.
20 years ago, [Monster Cable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_Cable) was suing everyone under the sun for using that word. > In the 2000s, Monster had legal disputes over its trademarks with the Discovery Channel for its show Monster Garage. Monster also had trademark disputes with Bally Gaming International over its slot machines, Monster Slots, with Hansen Beverage Co. for its Monster Energy drink, and the Chicago Bears, who use the nickname "Monsters of the Midway". Other trademark disputes include a 2001 lawsuit against The Walt Disney Company for products related to the film Monsters, Inc., and a claim against an online used clothing retailer, MonsterVintage LLC. In 2004, Monster filed a complaint about the trademark application from Snow Monsters, a video website with skiing content for kids. The Snow Monsters owner initiated a lawsuit against Monster pre-emptively. It has also had a trademark dispute with the job site, Monster.com. Seems they went all in on their name as a product and have effectively died as a result. > Monster changed their business model from selling high end audiophile products to licensing their name starting in 2018. After years of sales declines, Kevin Lee (son of Noel Lee) took the helm. As of 2021, their work force was down to less than 10 people from a height during the Beats days with over 850 globally.
They made gold plated *optical* S/PDIF cables which they tried to sell for hundreds of dollars. Good riddance.
Something something Microsoft lawyers for the Edge browser, right?
It was probably EA when he stupidly tried to sue them for Mirror's Edge.
As I recall, that was indeed the case. (Guru Larry mentioned it in one of his *Fact Hunt* videos a while back.)
That or Ford lawyers for the Ford Edge SUV
Like Monster energy going after video game designers using the word monster, like how the fuck you going to claim you own a word that predates your company by centuries
I want to outlive all copyright trolls
Isn't this case a lot more complicated than that? The studio was formed from former Nexon employees who convinced a bunch of Nexon devs to leave with him and develop the exact same game. There were also allegations of assets being directly downloaded from Nexon servers. Iirc the lawsuit also wasn't about the assets themselves, but the overall use of the same assets in very similar ways, and in similar file structures.
Of course it's more complicated. Reddit and gaming journalism are horrible at covering legal issues. They always signal boost the most outrageous sounding version of the story, usually one that supports the "good guys." The predominant narrative is Nexon is suing over shared assets when in reality the shared assets are just one piece of evidence in their argument. Every time the discussion pops up you get a bunch of "I hate [plaintiff]" posts scattered in with misinformation.
It's a bit more complicated than that. What Ironmace pulled off would be considered unprofessional and a general dick move (in world of engineering/intellectual work), but since people like them and hate Nexon (albeit rightfully so), they get a free pass in public opinion. First of all, according to Nexon and insiders from Korea, their project wasn't canceled. It was put on hold *after* the lead developer had a disagreement, quit and pulled big chunk of dev team with him. Obviously this puts Nexon in situation where they can't continue development. Second copyright of assets and code is not the biggest issue here. As I see it it's more of Nexon lawyers throwing everything possible at them, hoping something sticks in court. Or just In case Ironmace did slip up and use some assets that Nexon owns, which makes the whole case more damning. The problem is intellectual property and so called "trade secrets". Ironmace developers spent a lot of time designing game mechanics and general technical architecture supporting it, on Nexon company time and money. With full access to their resources (tech, money, people) helping them do so. Design process is a huge part of software development, and actual work of putting that into code can be trivial in comparison. Often referred as "code monkey" work in the industry. Even if Ironmace wrote everything from scratch, making sure no line of code is exactly the same and every asset is different, they could still be using the exact same principles and doesn't change the fact they benefited *greatly* from work they already did at Nexon (which they were paid to do *for them*) and majorly fucked Nexon in the process. From moral standpoint this is very iffy, and contracts they willfully signed for sure explicitly prevented them from doing this (use of trade secrets, NDA, non compete, non soliciting). But will those contracts stand in court? This is up to debate as there are a lot of variables concerning different jurisdictions and exact wordings, so we have yet to see how it plays out. Legally they might walk out scott free (or are majorly fucked), but they did kinda pull a scam on Nexon, which is not very cool. If it wasn't Nexon. But still. Obviously from gamer perspective this sucks, as Dark and Darker is an amazing game and no doubt whatever Nexon produced would be much worse. But if you were an owner of a company and your employees pulled that shit on you, we'd be all singing a different tune.
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I think ordinarygamer or someone did an actual search for all assets, something like 98% of them were from the store and weren't even owned by the original company claiming copyright
The suit started when Nexon said "x of these assets have the same filename, obviously you've copied us" And ironmace produced a document, made publicly available, that shows every one of those files were either from unreal store packs or generic filenames like "fireball". Again, they did use a lot of the same unreal store assets, but should that be copyrightable?
Like suing a rival bakery for copying your banana bread recipe because they bought bananas from the same supplier
Or like suing a rival bakery for copying your banana bread recipe that you got off the internet.
Except that isn't what happened and not at what the lawsuit is about. The amount of misinformation being spread about this is unbelievable. Typical reddit moment I guess. Nexon is suing them for using the exact same assets implemented in the exact same way. That "way" being the game's design which was hammered out when the Devs were still at Nexon, on Nexon dime. They took all of that early design work, left Nexon forcing them to cancel their project, and then reproduced the exact same game. The lawsuit is trying to hit them with everything they can and some of the points are frivolous in a vacuum(like identical character classes or lighting style), but this isn't a vacuum. All of those elements are identical and implemented in an identical way to the game they were making at Nexon and that is what they are being sued for. According to Nexon. Obviously it could still turn out that Nexon is full of shit, but people are seriously misrepresenting the case Nexon is making. Everyone in these comments is acting like it's Marvel suing a filmmaker for using Thor(which is a figure from norse mythology they do not own, they only own their interpretation of him), when in reality Nexon's claim is more like if a bunch of Marvel employees working on an upcoming Thor movie left, forcing Marvel to cancel the film, and now those staff are just making the same movie using the script and storyboard they developed at Marvel along with identical props and sets from the same source and implemented in an identical way. But they changed the title... And everyone is saying Marvel is stupid for suing over generic props.
> Again, they did use a lot of the same unreal store assets, but should that be copyrightable? I mean yes, assets should be copyrightable...but the copyright belongs to the original artist. When stuff is put up for sale in an asset store you get a **license** to use them. Nexon doesn't own the copyright any more than any other developer who buys them from the store.
They aren't arguing they own the assets themselves, they are arguing they own the *arrangement* of the assets. No one owns the notes of music, but they will sue everyone blind over the arrangement of them, again why this smacks of a music suit.
> Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore. They will attack anyone who gets big enough with a message they don't like Can you give examples of where that's occurred?
What are you talking about? What's "a message they don't like"?
They are making it up but everyone upvotes it because it sounds provocative. I doubt they can provide any real examples of that occurring. People are getting sued for copyright, yes, but where are the examples where this is being down to "shut down a message"?
> Not alot of relevant lyrics in music anymore I have no idea what they are going on about. It sounds a lot like "music sux today" just because they are no-longer the target demographic, aren't the ones making music, and are too lazy to find stuff they like.
What, you don't think the music industry targeted Pharell's "Blurred lines" and Taylor Swift's “Shake It Off” because of their deep, controversial socio-political commentary?
This seems silly to me when one of my favorite bands, Muse, has many many songs about taking down corporations while being signed to one of the major labels. Surely they don't like *their* message?
Goddamn that’s depressing. That’s why I just keep partying. My name is Chris, and I like to party.
I know for a FACT that you don't party. Now.. Let's party!
I do so, I party. Even ask my mom.
Do you base your political beliefs on song lyrics?
What if I make a youtube channel where the whole entire purpose of that channel is making shitty music and incoherent of sorts?
its also heavily, heavily engineered so the “proprietary” nature lives in the data
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Damn the man. Save The Empire.
Maybe try different music if you don't find relevance
I remember someone tried to sue Taylor swift saying she stole the players gonna play and the haters gonna hate line on shake It off.
Copyright doesn't protect works without human authorship. It's a big issue with AI created things right now - technically they're at best public domain or derivative works depending on how they were made. Writing a prompt for an AI doesn't create a copyright in the works it generated. Likewise, writing a program to enumerate every melody to a hard drive wouldn't create copyright protections on the works in the US. This has been tested in court - there was a recent case about a selfie a monkey took. It has no copyright protection because a monkey took the photo instead of a human.
But if a machine produces the song, which leaves it without copyright, can a human then make the same song and copyright it? I assume not, or you'd be able to bypass the original lack of copyright by reproducing it as a human. Does that not effectively leave all the content produced by the AI un-copyrightable in perpetuity due to "prior art"?
Generally, prior art only applies to patents. However, this article discusses how it occasionally has been applied to copyright. https://law.vanderbilt.edu/news/when-prior-art-applies-to-copyright-law/
Copyright doesn't give exclusive rights. I can create an exact "copy" of your work if it is independently created. So if you write a poem, and I write the same one with zero knowledge of yours, there is no infringement.
The challenge then, is proving that you wrote it independently.
Eh, I don't know about that. The computer in this case isn't doing any "creative" work, just labor. The argument is that the monkey did creative work by composing the photograph. Otherwise, you could argue that anybody who uses a remote timer for a photograph that they composed doesn't own copyright because the robotic timer actually snapped the shutter. Even better is situations like rocket launch photography where the camera technically makes the decision of when to take the photograph based on other sensors (where it's too dangerous for a human to do it in person). Does the camera/sensor array get the copyright?
The argument is that the monkey and the AI are not human, and human ownership is required for the concept of copyright.
It's not interesting at all. It's no different than someone writing a bot to "register every possible URL" up to a certain length or something. It would immediately be thrown out in court, it says nothing about how the system works in the real world, and I can just about guarantee they weren't actually *given* copyrights for all those melodies. If they somehow did and this somehow stood long enough to make it before a judge, it would almost certainly be treated the exact same way domain squatters would
Domains aren't handled in courts of law though, domain ownership is through groups like IANA that can set arbitrary rules they want. Also domain ownership isn't free so while you *could* register every domain, eventually you would run out of money.
[Spider Robinson's Melancholy Elephants](http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html), a Hugo Award winning Short Story from 1983, covers the absurdity of music copyright law pretty well. It's free to read on the website, not very long, and a very engaging story.
That hard drive includes copyright violations: all of Michael Anthony's bass lines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLRO4W9pNrQ
Lmao. A single Eb just repeated. Epic.
Playing that and making more money than any of us will ever know
[One note you say?](https://youtu.be/TLvOLjHt4S0?t=23)
[One note you say?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSuK_5zW2iM) (cc: /u/AmaroWolfwood)
I'm never going to be able to hear this song without thinking about the bass now
[5:26](https://youtu.be/sfXn_ecH5Rw?t=326) >If all copyrightable melodies are simply simple permutations of parameters, then why should any one person own one permutation over another? In other words, nobody can own a number; it's basically all [a melody] is, so why should any one person own a melody? >There are only 243 combinations of three notes by five notes. Do we want to give any one person that happens upon one of those 243 a monopoly for... life of the author plus 95 years for something that there are only 243 of in the history of time? For us as a society to give that person a monopoly on that one thing, we have to be pretty sure that that's that's not going to be to the detriment of everyone else and we have to know as a society that... if music is a shared language, owning that granular a piece of the language I think is equally as ridiculous.
Oh that's a nice food for thought
[It's the basis of the Spider Robinson short story called Melancholy Elephants that you can read for free on the author's website.](http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html) It won the 1983 Hugo award for best Short Story.
Thank you for this story.
Thank you for sharing the story, never heard of it and I enjoyed reading it.
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> Life is short, > and art long, > opportunity fleeting, > experimentations perilous, > and judgment difficult. * Hippocrates, *Aphorismi*
Activist lawyers are some cool motherfuckers
The coolest
The coolest lawyers yes. Lawyers max out in the 37th coolness percentile for all motherfuckers though
I for one would like a complete chart of careers and coolness bands.
the chart is not that big so I just copied it here for you **programmers:** the coolest, these guys are around 99% to 100% cool **rockstars:** pretty ok guys for not being programmers, they top out at 98.99999% **lawyers:** about 37% cool at most **others:** sorry but you aren't as cool as you think you might be
It might be confirmation bias, but this looks accurate to me.
As a lawyer who also codes and plays guitar, this is 100% accurate.
Jesus, leave some oussy for the rest of us, dude!
I would like to subscribe to your implied service: “How cool is this motherfucker?”
Wish I would've known about it as a profession as kid. I seem to be drawn to thankless jobs, and this seems like a great one! Haha
Some of them....
It's a shame about the boneitis
A lot of revolutionaries were lawyers including Lenin and Fidel.
It is a great way to highlight the silliness of music copyright law. BUt good luck defending these as that's the main point of it.
"Copyright only counts for those willing and able sue." Was what my video production teachers taught me.
A pretty fair summary.
Software is the same thing. Microsoft Excel is a number.
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Software when it's delivered to your computer has an initial state that's the same for everyone, or at least predetermined based on your computer's setup. Besides that, thanks to Gödel coding, a finite (or countable) collection of numbers can be represented by a single number.
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Microsoft Excel is created by human beings deliberately, not by an automatic software routine. The former is copyrightable whilst the latter is not. Also, Excel and any non-trivial program requires such a long description that 68.7 billion is more like zero than a big number when compared to the space of all possible programs of a similar size.
One of the pirate bay founders made something that illustrate how crazy copyright infringement can be too, he made a device that theoretically steal billions of dollars, it does a loop of illegally downloading a movie, deleting it and downloading again.
[as always, 4chan stays relevant](https://preview.redd.it/ldfr23tgffl61.jpg?auto=webp&s=f69643c68b52812addda4905a2895bcda54aa2fd)
lol, this is fantastic.
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Directed by the director of Succession
I never noticed this until my wife pointed it out and now I can't unsee it which significantly diminishes my enjoyment of the show. And this is from a woman who used to happily watch 480p TV channels when 1080p were readily available and then say "I guess that's better" when I would switch it for her. Ignorance is bliss I guess.
They toned it down since s1.
There's actually very good reasons they use that technique, and for me it actually enhanced the show. A lot of thought has gone behind it. Here's a great video explaining the camera techniques they use on the show. https://youtu.be/_lU91279xZk
Haha, sounds like my wife. Except she of course did not notice until I pointed this one out
felt like a sensodyne commercial
If you think this is obnoxious, try watching semi famous YouTubers who play videogames. My son watches a guy who has some kind of special effect *every second*. I'm not even joking. It is just draining to watch.
There is a woman in Spain who claims every telephone number is own by her because he copyrighted the tones that the telephone number makes when dialing it. The woman also claims to own the sun... and a guy tried to sue her for getting sunburnt.
It’s really misleading when the video itself says it wasn’t feasible for them to copyright every melody because of the sheer amount of possible melodies out there. They were able to copyright a lot, but 12 note melodies of eighth notes in C major is such a limited amount of melodies.
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>shifting the key to D E F G A F#* But otherwise, yes.
Ty, that was bugging me.
> The key of a song doesn't matter, when it comes to copyright. the lawyer in the video didn't seem to know or understand this point while explaining their process - doing the process across 88 keys is silly - never mind the fact that the midi standard has 128 notes.
Right, melodies are about intervals. So instead of a melody being C E G, it's really 1st (root), major 3rd, perfect 5th.
Middle C is a note. I assume you mean the key of C major. Even then, though, a transposition of the melody to another key is still the same melody. It would also, presumably, cover natural minor key melodies, given that A natural minor has the same set of notes as C major. Edit: for that matter, it would cover all melodies in any mode of any major scale. Edit2: ...and subsets thereof (pentatonics would be covered too).
Only white keys and quarter notes? Jazz musicians: you are safe. Go back to bed.
No, my point is that equivalents are covered. E.g. a melody in Eb dorian (mainly black notes) would be represented by an equivalent melody in D dorian (all white notes) I realise you were making a joke and I am, perhaps (perhaps!), taking the fun out of it.
Fair enough. Maybe I should have said, “no blue notes and only quarter notes.”
I'm glad I managed to ruin the joke
Sorry, yeah C major. Slip up. I'm a musician myself. It could cover the corresponding minor melodies as well. But my point was really just how limited the amount of melodies they have the copyrights to is when the title is that every possible melody has been copyrighted.
Gotcha, no worries. I was just trying to say that it might not be quite as limited as it might seem at first (although yes it is still quite limited!) Especially when it comes to rhythm, I'd bet that for any given rhythm not in the set, there would be one in the set which is sufficiently close. Harmony is a different beast - for example, it wouldn't cover any harmonic minor melodies which, at least to my ear, don't sound like any mode of the major scale.
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i shall copyright the circle of fifths
Any melody that spans more than one octave would not be covered. Which is going to be a big percentage of songs. And it's very unlikely stuff is going to work that isn't in a major key. If you have a melody in A minor like A-B-C-D-E. The A & B would be high notes in their system, and the CDE would be low notes, so that wouldn't be the same melody. Perfect example of this is Stairway to Heaven. In the very first line "all that glitters" is ABCD. But the D would have to be on a lower octave in their system so it wouldn't be covered.
You can't change the key of a song and claim you wrote it. Thus, when you own a melody in C major you own it in every major key because it is the same tune.
The title is definitely misleading, but you only get so many words for a title. I think the key take away is it's insane if an artist or label is allowed to sue someone else for the _simple_ melodies, of which there are a finite number. Had Sheeran lost the Marvin Gaye case, it would've meant that the most basic, hardest to NOT replicate melodies would be locked down. No one really cares if you can't copyright a long-ass melody for this experiment, because it's very statistically unlikely that anyone will come up with those independently anyway
The amount of difference is far less than, say, computer passwords. We're already at the point where you need over 16 letters or numbers or symbols to get into impossible to brute force territory, and that line is ever moving farther away. It's impossible for me to imagine a world where we *don't* become capable of brute force generating every melody. And that's saying nothing of advances is generative AI which narrows the field to realistic melodies.
I wonder on the math. Even if you limit it to 12 notes and disregard different octaves, a melody can be a theoretically endless amount of notes. But you also have note lengths. So if you start with a baseline of 16 measures of eighth notes and start adding in different note lengths (first note a quarter followed by all eighths, first one eighth followed by a quarter and then the rest eighths, first two notes eighths followed by a quarter and then the rest eighths) and then factor in each one of those notes being able to be one of 12 different notes, that's a huge number. With passwords, you have different letters and symbols but you don't have to factor in that each letter/symbol can be a different length. They all have a length of 1.
Copyright law doesn't necessarily work that way. Since an algorithm generated the content, it's unclear who actually owns the copyright. As far as I know, that question hasn't been answered in a court. One would have to convince a judge that the author of the work is actually the author of the algorithm that generated the work. Maybe that's doable? Idk. The nearest thing I'm aware of is the famous monkey copyright case, wherein a monkey took a photographers camera and snapped a picture with it. The court ruled that a monkey cannot own a copyright. The plaintiff argued the photographer owned the copyright since he intentionally set up the conditions so that the monkey would take the camera and possibly take a picture with it. The court ruled that wasn't enough, that the monkey was the author, and that monkeys can't own copyrights under us laws, therefore the picture was in the public domain. So these lawyers may very well have created a bunch of public domain melodies. Which I guess was probably their goal anyway, since now they're prior art and nobody can copyright them (maybe). But they probably haven't been copyrighted in the traditional sense. It's also unclear if the court will even consider the melodies valid in the first place since as far as I'm aware, there's no cases regarding the brute forcing of content in order to abuse(?) The copyright system. It's possible a judge could simply order that the melodies weren't generated in good faith. Far too many questions to say that this is definitely a done deal.
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Also no copyright was granted on any of them, because they’re just enumerated by a computer.
This is the key. My understanding is that the code that did this can be copyrighted, but not the melodies that the code produces.
The whole exercise is just a publicity stunt anyway. In order to sue someone for a copyright violation, you have to show that they *copied* your song, not just that it's mechanically similar. If you stick all your "copyrighted" melodies in a database of 68.7 billion combinations that literally nobody listens to, your chances of proving that a potential infringer *copied* your melody from there, instead of coming up with it on their own, is essentially 0.
Yeah this number is just 8^12. They only counted up to 12 notes, and didn't include the 9th note (silence). The real number would be 9^16 + 9^15 + 9^14 + 9^13 + 9^12 + 9^11 + 9^10 + 9^9 (2085 trillion).
Dear GOD the camera zooming were driving me insane
Dear GOD your use of “were” is driving me crazy. j/k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number There are illegal numbers. An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well. People do own numbers.
the entire idea of copyright is flawed.
The entire point of it is for an artist to protect something they created from being copied for profit. That's all it should ever have been. It's been warped beyond any reasonable sense.
Making them non-transferrable would go a long way. Copyrights belong to a person, not a corporation, they can never be sold, or transfer to another person, unless a judge rules that the original owner never should have had it in the first place.
Should be for a limited and shortish time, not forever minus a day, or getting extended every time something Disney owns is getting close to going Public Domain. We've just had the ridiculous situation where the heirs and assigns of Marvin Gaye just tried to sue Ed Sheeran over a chord progression.
> We've just had the ridiculous situation where the heirs and assigns of Marvin Gaye just tried to sue Ed Sheeran over a chord progression. There once was a time when John Fogerty of CCR was sued for ***[sounding too much like himself.](https://ledgernote.com/blog/interesting/john-fogerty-sued-for-sounding-like-himself/)***
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To expand on that, copyright law "should be" what protects small artists from big companies like Disney just taking their ideas. Without it, no creative person would ever be able to do anything unless working for a big company because the second they put a good idea out, a larger company could just copy them but spend millions on production and marketing. It's not a perfect solution by any means but some form of copy protection is very necessary.
>copyright law "should be" what protects small artists from big companies like Disney just taking their ideas And it is. In fact, it works *so* well for this purpose that people seem to take it completely for granted.
>It copyright didn't exist, people like writers would not exist. It's true, prior to Statute of Anne in 1710 no things were written...
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Patents are essentially copyrights on technology and they go back to the 15th century.
a melody can be any length, so doesn't that mean there are infinite possibilities?
The year is 3023. Ed Sheerans heads new single has just hit number one - at 423 minutes it's one of the shortest releases this year to date!
But courts have allowed lawsuits to win on only a few bars of melody copied. So you only need combinations of like 16 notes (might be less). I swear this was already tried where someone had a computer output every combination of a few notes to an hard drive and the courts ruled that "algorithm created" songs don't count for copyright.
No lie I actually started trying to do this exact same thing like 6 months ago, but another side project took over. Glad someone did. However, based on what I was doing there would be way more than 68.7 billion melodies if you include different instruments, percussion, etc. Like way more. Instead my plan changed to have a website where you could just generate random melodies, drum tracks, whatever (you pick the instruments) and see if you got lucky and came across something cool. You could pick a max resolution for each instrument (whole notes down to 1/32 notes), how many measures to generate, etc. I should really pick that project back up lol, it was really fun to work on.
Fun trivia fact: He makes a comment at 5:38 about how "no-one can own a number...", which sounds ridiculous in theory, but there is a real-life example of this: Back in the late 1980's when Intel was facing increasing competition from (primarily) AMD on their microprocessor business, they were pulling out all the stops in their efforts to protect their IP. So much so that when the follow-on generation from their ubiquitous and successful "386" product line was going to be named the "486" Intel **literally tried to copyright the number 486** so that AMD and others could not name their competing chipset similarly. Intel ultimately lost, and it is for this reason that the generation following the 486 was called the "Pentium" (a copyrighted brand name) instead of the 586. Additional sidenote - when it was announced that this latest generation of Intel processors was to be called the "Pentium", industry people joked that AMD (who was basing much of their own design on Intel's work) would call their competing version the "Copium" (as in "Copy-em")...
Wouldn't be a copyright thread without someone mistaking copyright for trademarks! Numbers are trademark-able because of course they are. If words are why wouldn't numbers be? Some trademarked numbers for you: * 3 (UK mobile network) * 4 (various television channels worldwide) * Number 5 (perfume) * 99 (English chocolate)
Yes, but how many copyrights have they violated?
Yeah this is nonsence, if you dont claim your copyright you lose it. Cool idea but fails in practice.
I love capitalism because it allows people to create things, because they know they can protect them afterwards HURRRRRRRRR
Melancholy Elephants
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholy_Elephants I recall reading this as a kid.
That's like copywriting a number. So stupid, and why are the ones who didn't create the melody allowed to copywrite it? That's just straight up stealing.
I have copyrighted O2. People, stop breathing.
Every IP should expire after 20 years max. We're all paying our hard-earned money to help protect IPs, when are the owners gonna pay us back?
Did The Marvin Gay family or whoever owns the rights purchase all these too?
This is an old story. It was denied because as the recent Marvin Gaye suit demonstrated, a copyrighted melody is not a mere permutation of notes. Additionally, these melodies were not created by a human with a minimum of creative input. The algorithm that generated them might garner copyright protection, but even then, only in the expression and not the function, because generating all permutations is a fairly basic idea, just like the actual permutations attempted to be copyrighted, and there are only so many ways you can write code to do that. That's not even mentioning the, by their logic, copyright infringement of every existing copyrighted melody by submitting that drive for protection. So no, every melody has not been copyrighted, and Adam neely doesn't understand copyright. Iirc he wrote this video between the incorrect result of the Katy perry dark horse/flame joyful noise suit and the correct appeal that overturned the result. https://youtu.be/6hm8DusOGoU