Usually short phrases aren’t supposed to be protectable under copyright. However, when a defendant blatantly appropriates a well-known literary phrase for a commercial purpose like selling unlicensed merchandise, courts may make an exception.
[there actually are musicians that specialise in recording backing tracks intended to resemble a particular popular recording which aren't that recording for use in commercial products, but they tend not to get sued...]
Related: The Supreme Court ruled that excerpting a single paragraph from a 454-page book can be copyright infringement. The book was Gerald Ford's memoirs, the one paragraph was his reasoning for pardoning Nixon. The Court's reasoning was more-or-less that nobody cared about anything else Ford did, so excerpting the one paragraph was as good as giving the whole book away for free.
Whether a work in question is even eligible for protection at all is a distinct legal question.
The question in play is how much of of the copyrighted work may be reproduced before it is infringement.
Of course not every set of four notes or eleven letters in a copyrighted work is prohibited; the significance and context of the use matters.
In the latter case, there's also no real risk of accidentally stomping on that.
The claim in this particular case is that they really have generated the entire possible melody space. Legally I think it's likely to fail on multiple levels if it is ever challenged, but part of the point is that some of those failures should also be applied to some real copyright suits that have been won.
(It is somewhat ironic that the music industry continues to be so upset about copyright even as they appear to be converging on The One True Pop Song at speed. Maybe if they acted less like some sort of bizarrely over-trained AI and cranked up the exploration constant, they'd stomp on each other less.)
It's not just the music industry. The whole economy starts to feel like overfitting the profit function.
That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever you want, and you'll still be publically performing 4'33".
The rather humorous outcome, if one asks me, is that anyone who writes in 4 beats of silemce into a score should be violating copyright if we're going to be consistent.
That kind of thing is completely unenforceable with respect to performances, but in written musical notation, copying the specific notation pattern could be infringement. If you write "4/4, tempo 80, 91-measure rest", that's maybe violating the 4'33" copyright. If you write a score for a full band or orchestra that shows rests in each measure for each instrument, with key changes and tempo changes and such, you're just retelling the same joke in a different way.
Not even a thought experiment: it’s essentially a 4’33”-long ambient acoustic sample. There are plenty of these (though not usually that long) in sample libraries, recording e.g. traffic sounds, or diner conversation, or crickets in a marsh in summer, etc. And those are certainly copyrighted, unable to be used without license.
I would question any legal professional's authoritative standing to even advise on copyright of a work of music if they miscategorize a recording of ambient sound as a performance of a musical scoring consisting entirely of silence. The copyright doesn't apply to the ambient sound, but to the long quiessence of an artist at their instrument.
It demonstrates a complete blindness of the negative space of music, and a positivistic bias that has no place being enshrined in our legal system.
But there are degrees of absurdity, it's one thing to do that when there's 26^100000 possible combinations, it's another when there's just 12^100 (and if you only care about melody it's overestimation, most songs will use much smaller subset of that).
... but that doesn't mean copyright and patent aren't a perpetual battle against the "natural" arrangement of idea, and absurdities are extremely possible when the law is misinterpreted or mis-structured.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...
Who "generally agree"s on this? The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society.
But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does.
There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talking seriously about just burning the whole copyright / patent system to the ground. At least a subset of the countries in the groups listed are generally understood to have representative governments.
Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it was proposed in the US constitution. However, because a tiny minority has a huge benefit and society does not really notice the difference you get the modern mess of unending copyright.
You haven't diminished the ability for 350 million people to do things, practically, by shaving 1 cent off of them. But adding the ability a million dollars provides one individual to do something cool with 1 million they couldn't do before has increased the overall capabilities of everyone.
In essence, you've just described Kickstarter's business model.
Basically, even if individual bacteria are unnoticed enough of them can kill you.
If tiny minority + 'society' is the entirety of the system, then that's true, but there are also plenty of players who lose out due to restrictive IP regimes—and it's hard to quantify the extent of those losses. (Whether or not the benefits they would reap from looser IP are appropriate or fair is beside the question for utilitarian computations.)
What would be the point of a patent system with unlimited duration? If we wanted that, we could just have companies not reveal their inventions in the first place
Yeah, that's the assumption I take issue with.
I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability.
On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted.
Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or want financial compensation.
I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.
In terms of public opinion, it would be interesting to know what studies have been done. I imagine if you would get broad support for an author copyrighting a book, and less on patenting a pre-existing genetic sequence.
As another unsubstantiated claim, I think if you sat down with the general public and the criteria for patents, they would mostly agree.
The challenge has to do with implementing them and the legal process around them.
If a crappy patent is issued to large corporation, it is incredibly expensive to challenge them.
Basically, America's crazy overreach forces our laws onto other nations - this is actually one thing that really frustrates me about corporate tax loopholes, that overreach could be trivially used to force better international standards for corporate VAT taxes there just isn't the political will (due to lobbying) to get it done.
At the risk of getting stuck in a loop: "No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony"
> and if you only care about melody it's overestimation
And they did it that way because courts don't worry about the exact tempo, meter and rhythm when ruling on plagiarism.
There was a guy trying to copyright A CHORD :)
That much is true.
> a guy trying to copyright A CHORD
IIRC he failed miserably.
A better example would be the (until recently) coprighted song "Happy Birthday." [1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/happy-birthda...
Some might say lumping trademark, copyright, patent and trade secret laws (historically and in practice very different things) under one heading called "intellectual property" is an intentional strategy to muddy the waters and cloud any argument.
:)
Interestingly, there are writers who want to argue originality based on the arrangement of letters in 26-letter alphabet!
The world is indeed a strange place for the dogmatically logical programmer.