I’ve suspected this all along, and although I’ve written about it before and advocated for this viewpoint, my message didn’t seem to travel far. Until now.
Now, there is a TED talk precisely about it. Automatically generating and fixing all melodies in a tangible medium, thereby providing proof of copyright. For many decades, copyright lawsuits over melody identity or similarity has been a serious problem in the music industry. The idea that you are taking a blank slate and putting something onto it from nothing? No, that’s not the way it works with melodies. With melodies, there are so few choices to choose from at the base level, a choice of one of 8 piano keys up to a maximum sequence of 12 notes, that melodies on their own can hardly be considered copyrightable. Rather, it is like we are picking from the finite set of melodies that have existed for all of time. If we’re lucky, we pick one that hasn’t been picked by anyone else before. If we’re unlucky, we pick one that has been already used, and then we get sued.
But, this project, All the Music, levels the playing field because it has picked all the melodies, fixed tehm in a tangible medium, and declared them to be released into public domain, thereby eliminating the risk of copyright infringement on any future melody composed. Matter of fact, it means no future melody can be claimed copyright protection.
20200217/https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=sJtm0MoOgiU&feature=emb_logo
20200217/http://allthemusic.info/
20200217/https://github.com/allthemusicllc/
20200217/https://github.com/allthemusicllc/atm-cli
20200217/https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets
What about chords? These have purportedly already been exhausted by a project of peter burke in 2017, and you can find it on GitHub.
Now, despite the fact that the authors behind this project had knowledge in the intersection of law, software development, and music, I still wonder if this effort is going to be seriously considered in future court cases. I mean, some judge could rule that All the Music is still legally untested ground and need not be considered in the judgement of a current court case, in which the evidence is dismissed completely and the old skool infringement questions are traveled down just like nothing changed in the world. The question, as it comes down to in the YouTube video comments, really comes down to making this not just a theoretical reality, but common knowledge in the legal profession. When every lawyer is aware of the argument as to why a melody on its own should not be eligible for copyright protection or worth anything in copyright infringement lawsuit cases, then the project will be a success. Alas, that could take up to 10 years from the genesis day of 2019, so maybe not until the year 2030 will the idea that melodies can’t be copyright protected be a reality.