Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Recording All the Melodies

Jason Kottke:

In this recent TED Talk, lawyer, musician, and technologist Damien Riehl talks about the rapidly diminishing number of melodies available to songwriters under the current system of copyright. In order to help songwriters avoid these melodic legal landmines (some of which are documented here), Riehl and his pal Noah Rubin designed and wrote a program to record every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody and released the results — all 68+ billion melodies, 2.6 terabytes of data — into the public domain.

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Sad indication of how broken the copyright system is, as it exists today. Unlike some folks I do believe that having some copyright is valuable, but we've gone so, so far beyond what's reasonable.

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