> Huh? For one, nothing stops you from saying you are the creator, and nobody would have any way to say you're not.
Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud.
Proving that you're not the creator is another issue, which would probably make for an interesting case.
> Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
That's somewhat different though. Setting rules makes it a predictable process, and you have a one-way system: you set the rules and you always get the same result. A generator that would generate all possible results isn't the same.
If you sifted through all those randomly generated things, found one that you like, and published it, things get fuzzy, I guess. Maybe the curation would qualify as the creative input.
>Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying.
Well, there is. If you get caught you get to jail.
Whereas if you get "caught" saying this generated melody is your melody, nothing happens. It's a totally valid thing to copyright. (And even if it wasn't, unlike the store theft case, there's no way for anybody to tell and prove it's not yours anyway).
But in any case, you appear confused as to this.
Whatever tool you can use to create a melody, the melody is still yours to copyright (unless somebody else came with it first and copyrighted it). You don't have to "think" of the melody or write it on the piano, or something.
In fact tons of melodies nowadays are written partially or wholly by compositional tools.
People using those tools have the regular claim to the output melodies, regardless of whether the tool is some DAW utility or "random melody" button (all of which exist), a music synthesis algorithm with some params and seed, or even an exhaustive, minimally creative tool to iterate over all possible melodies.
> There's no rule "you can't copyright a generated melody".
If that was so, then no more melodies can be copyrighted after that group that was also mentioned somewhere else in the threads generated (essentially) all melodies, claimed copyright and then released them into the public domain. Alas, there is, even with people claiming copyright on individual generated melodies!
Again, I think the curation is relevant. You can certainly copyright a book, even though "it's somewhere in Pi". If you endlessly calculate fractions of Pi and check them for something interesting, I'm sure you can copyright whatever poem you find.
>If that was so, then no more melodies can be copyrighted after that group that was also mentioned somewhere else in the threads generated (essentially) all melodies, claimed copyright and then released them into the public domain.
Well, that's true.
But
(a) nobody is going to cross-check their melodies against a new copyright claim,
(b) they are not going to claim infrigement against anyone,
So there's that. And even if they did, they'd be thrown out as a joke-submission (the content being "all possible melodies" etc).
But you can submit hundreds of generated melodies, copyright them, and succesfully sue people for infringing of them. The fact that they were generated doesn't change anything.
Sure, just as nothing is stopping you from walking into a store, taking something, and walking out without paying. It's when you get caught doing so that the trouble beings. If you get caught, not only do you not get the copyright, but you've likely committed fraud.
Proving that you're not the creator is another issue, which would probably make for an interesting case.
> Half of Brian Eno's output is generated works, where he sets some rules on a music synthesis system, and lets it create a work. Never had any issue copyrighting them...
That's somewhat different though. Setting rules makes it a predictable process, and you have a one-way system: you set the rules and you always get the same result. A generator that would generate all possible results isn't the same.
If you sifted through all those randomly generated things, found one that you like, and published it, things get fuzzy, I guess. Maybe the curation would qualify as the creative input.