The algorithm created 68 billion combinations - all so that musicians would stop suing each other over copyright.
On January 30, the TEDx YouTube channel posted a talk by technology lawyer Damien Riehl. He talked about how, with partner Noah Rubin (Noah Rubin), he decided to stop the lawsuits of musicians over copyright, which "stifle creativity and freedom."
To do this, programmers generated "all possible" tunes in MIDI, protected them with copyright, and then made them "public domain" - so the tunes are not subject to intellectual property rights.
Often musicians are sued over the fact that the music in their songs is similar in parts or separate sets of notes. According to Riehl, in such situations there is room not only for deliberate theft, but also for "limited mathematical equations" - there is always a chance that the artists have come up with two similar tunes independently of each other. According to the programmers, it is precisely from such proceedings that they want to save the musicians.
Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded all possible combinations of eight notes and 12 measures. In fact, they used brute-force tactics, going through all combinations to one. According to the developers, the algorithm generated 300 thousand melodies per second, and there were 68 billion of them.
The authors of the project have published all the tunes under the Creative Commons Zero license, which provides for copyright disclaimer. As Vice notes, this is the easiest way to actually make something "public domain." This is what the programmers were striving for - they published all their developments on Github.
It cannot yet be said if this will work in future music-related trials. It is also unknown whether already created and copyrighted melodies were included in the generated combinations. But Riel and Rubin are optimistic about this.
