>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.
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.
(Actually some musicians/coders did exactly the latter: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxepzw/musicians-algorithmic... )
There's no rule "you can't copyright a generated melody".