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A comment on Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits. Parent comment

Re:Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to pre... by lmkg on Friday February 28, 2020 @11:21AM (#22443840)
Copyright law considers the importance of a sample to the work as a whole, in addition to just the size. Any arbitrary three-word phrase from the middle of a script is probably not copyright infringement. The most memorable line from the entire movie probably is.

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.

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Re:Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to pre... by bdowling on Friday February 28, 2020 @07:40PM (#22447761)
The amount and substantiality of the copied portion to the work as a whole is one of the factors for fair use, an affirmative defense.

Whether a work in question is even eligible for protection at all is a distinct legal question.

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Re:Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to pre... by paulddraper on Saturday February 29, 2020 @06:09AM (#22450054)
Yes, but no one is disputing the legal eligibility of movies or songs for copyright protection.

The question in play is how much of of the copyrighted work may be reproduced before it is infringement.

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