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Making and Detecting Illegal Music
Demona writes "Long-time music aficionado
Dave Marsh has an article in the latest edition of
Counterpunch entitled
Sampler's Delight. Giving rave reviews to "Nothing to Fear", the
latest in a
long line of so-called
illegal music, he also describes a "'major label waveform CD database,' which is capable of recognizing materials allegedly owned by the record label cartel." This database is allegedly why a UK pressing plant rejected the initial attempt at publishing "Nothing To Fear", which is comprised almost entirely of sampled material."
cd mp3; ls *
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Purchasing laws deosn't work. Technology doesn't work either. Freedom is a bitch, isn't it Valenti and Rosen?
Does anybody really expect that Resampling crappy music is really going to result in anything other then just more crappy music?
Why don't these people put their time to some constructive use and learn how to write actual music on their own, heck, the world could use some actual song writters now days. . . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Pac-Man Fever should have been illegal. They dropped the ball on that 15 years ago, however.
As a lot of readers probably know gracenote uses simple metrics about the length of the songs and their position on the cd to check a database to find likely matches. Gracenote maintains nothing of the sort of a waveform database.
While i believe there is/was at least one startup that was working to match music using a beats & tone analysis method that could match to songs that had been shifted or obscured in some way, i'm not sure this technology has ever been in real use.
The idea that there is some huge waveform database that cd pressing plants now use is pretty suspicious. I think working in the industry i would have heard about it, even if it was kept secret the storage capacity and processing needs would be astronomical. 11,000 albums heavily compressed to 160kbps still takes approximately 600gb, I understand that the amount of in print US albums is somewhere between 200,000 - 300,000 and more like 600,000 for world releases (in print only). Searching through a collection like that would easily take days or weeks depending on how small a segment you were trying to match
Most MP3 files downloaded via a P2P service are illegal no matter what. However, possession of a copy of one of these recordings is illegal even if you have purchased a CD because they're "derivative works" of 1. a musical work and 2. a sound recording. Copyright owners have won infringement lawsuits over four notes from a musical work and over one note from a sound recording. (The latter link will tell you that the four-note rule does not apply, but the four-note rule applies to musical works, which are independent of any recording of such works.)
When there are fewer than 50,000 possible melodies, how can anybody write new music? "Apparently, they just do" does not answer the question.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What more blatent example of satire can there be than an artist scrambling and re-arranging the works of other artists for the sake of mockery. I myself enjoy warping and "Mashing" otherwise lame recordings. If someone can take one creation, and turn it into another, it should be respected as a seperate work of art. Besides, I haven't seen an original concept in popular music for years. Most modern music is just recycled chords, lyrics, and beats.
Fortunately there's an easy solution. Write and sell music of your own, and then the problem goes away. Hard to believe, I know.
Pay the fuck up!
Make a song detailing how to decrypt dvds.
If major labels are bothering you all so much, why do you keep supporting them by talking about their bands, trading their music, grudgingly BUYING THEIR CDs??
Sometimes I just don't get the Slashdot crowd... Many of us use Linux and have given up on using Microsoft stuff, but when it comes to the latest crappy mainstream music, we whine that we can't pirate it? Come on.... If you really feel that major labels are screwing you, give them up. Support inedepent musicians and labels.
There's a whole world of music out there that is cheaper, more interesting, more cutting-edge, etc..etc... You just have to look a little harder to find it, just like you had to try a bit harder to get Linux installed and your closed-source applications replaced by Free Software.
Sorry for the rant...you might mod me down, but really....If some big companies are doing something you don't like, forget about them and move on to something better.
Cheers,
Vic
I remember something about copyright law and music: you are legally allowed to use 4 measures or 10?
You're allowed to use three notes, as long as they aren't a sample. For more information, read my other comment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Doesn't Gracenote work by track lengths on the CD? I always thought that was why Windows Media Player said my Rogue Spear CD was Hell Freezes Over by The Eagles.
Too bad this didn't come along earlier.
Maybe Queen/David Bowie could split the rights to Ice Ice Baby. The bassline is exactly the same, and he sampled without acknowledgement or permission. It would be just like when the Stones won ownership of Bittersweet Symphony.
Why don't these people put their time to some constructive use and learn how to write actual music on their own
Could it perhaps be because songwriters either are close to running out of unique melodies or already have run out of unique melodies? (There exist fewer than 50,000 possible melodies; read this article to see why.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Such releases are quite similar to flamebait on slashdot, except that the flaming that follows is written in legalese, and, well, karma isn't what they should be afraid of losing... =)
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right! =)
So why can't I find this on kazaa?
While i believe there is/was at least one startup that was working to match music using a beats & tone analysis method that could match to songs that had been shifted or obscured in some way
That was Relatable.
i'm not sure this technology has ever been in real use.
Napster 10.x used it. MusicBrainz uses it.
11,000 albums heavily compressed to 160kbps still takes approximately 600gb
Relatable claims that its tech can identify songs down to 16 kbps.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not sure exactly how it works, but is there not a certain degree of freedown allowable in reference parodies? Negativland may have gone a bit far in this case by using clips from the songs, but I've seen lots of other parodies that seemed to go father...
Hasn't Puff Daddy ... proven your
assertion already?
Except... (Skip the obvious troll to get to my point)
Puffy took *good* music and turned it into complete crap.
However, you raise a good point.
Why can *he* steal 90% of a song, unmodified, and sell it as "his" work, while these other "illegal" artists take small clips and heavily modify them, yet the result counts as a copyright violation?
The answer?
Puffy sells.
These other groups do not.
At the "Negativland" link, it mentions that the fee, $70k, exceeds their *total* sales in 14 years. That does not make the labels money.
I think that about sums up anything we can discuss on this topic. Copyright violations only matter if no one makes money off it (interestingly, the exact *opposite* of what the law says, where penalties come in direct proportion to how much someone profits from the use of stolen material). Make the RIAA money, regardless of how, or prepare to face legal battles the likes of which even Puffy couldn't weather. Fortunately for Puffy, and Wierd Al, and every other SUCCESSFUL artist that makes "derivative" works, the RIAA can make enough off the music to keep them at bay.
Fortunately there's an easy solution. Write and sell music of your own
Do you guarantee that the solution you mention is even possible to perform? See my other comment.
Will I retire or break 10K?
As the second article you link to states, the test is for the tune being "substantially similar."
However, even though I know that "substantial similarity" is strictly not a statistical measure, four notes is the best statistical approximation of "substantially similar" that I have ever found. Do you have a better one? And how does a songwriter determine whether or not a work that he or she created is "substantially similar" to at least one of the million or so musical works still under copyright?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I was hoping to hear from these guys. In the early 90's Hip-hop was very much on its way to becoming the next big thing.(Yes I'm a white boy, but I liked it OK?)
There was a big arm-wresting match over sampling rights. In the end the record companies won by suing and threatening artists who used samples in thier music. The practice was further erased by requiring artists to "clear" thier samples ahead of time with the recording studios, many of which required the artist to pay royalties on each sample used.
This was a very real and demonstrable case where RIAA-like tactics destroyed a promising art form. I think it's another reason why digitally traded music should be allowed to flourish...simply because it re-creates an environment where this type of music can start again where it left off.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I think that most of the rips on p2p networks are sooo shitty that no software could detect anything. Ever try getting a song off kazaa? You are lucky if there isn't at least 10 flwas. I have trouble figuring out what I am listening through the static, let alone some software.
I'm sure a good slashdotting will really hit their pockets hard.
I hold a patent on sigs...
Yeah; like. When you the MP3 of the song in a few filters, it gives the DeCSS source code.
I don't support the RIAA. I haven't bought a CD in years. I do as much as I can to spread awareness about why RIAA is evil. I think you would find many other slashdotters do the same.
Life is too short to proofread.
Hmm...
There may only be 50,000 possible melodies but,
I play the guitar, and I can bend or tremmilo a note, vary the attack and tambra, have non standard note durations. etc....
So there are 50000 melodies and thousads of ways of playing them
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Digital signal processing, it matches the signal from the music at certain points and then checks based on track length, cd length and other such pieces of information.
but is there not a certain degree of freedown allowable in reference parodies?
Under United States copyright law as interpreted by the courts, parody is only parody when the parody ridicules the original work itself. That's why The Wind Done Gone is legal but The Cat Not in the Hat isn't.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Your post is misleading.
There are less than 50,000 4-note melodies. 4 notes being all it took in one particular court case.
However that only means that there are 50,000 unique melodies in a legal sense.
In an artistic sense there are millions.
it matches the signal from the music at certain points
Clarification: Gracenote's CDDB 2 may do this. CDDB 1 (used by FreeDB) was based solely on track lengths.
Will I retire or break 10K?
you suck
Those are all in Real Audio streaming format; the worst of the worst.
When you the MP3 of the song in a few filters, it gives the DeCSS source code.
I have done this. Along the lines of what Aphex Twin used to hide his face, I wrote a program that converted a .bmp of the efdtt source code (efdtt is a small DeCSS program, available at the Gallery of CSS Descramblers) into a waveform (using an inverse fourier transform of sorts) and mixed it on top of some song.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actual I was thinking more of Britney Spears singing:
q T="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;8 ,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC; ( P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))>8^(E&(F=( S=O>>14&7^O)^S*8^S>=8)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}p rint+qT,@a}';
eval"
"s''$/=\2048;
while(){G=29;
R=142;
if((@a=un
_=unqb24,qT,@b=map{ordqB
s/...$/1$&/;
Q=unqV,qb25,_;
H=73;
O=$b[4]>8^
s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;
s/q/pack+/g;
catchy beat eh?
sometimes I wonder how Weird Al and others get away with some of their works, unless they have contracts/agreements with the original artists?
Al Yankovic makes a point of signing such contracts with the original songwriters. He doesn't have to pay the original performers because he typically doesn't sample; he covers (re-performs) the songs. For example, that's why the guitar at the beginning of "She Drives Like Crazy" sounds so much different from the one at the beginning of "She Drives Me Crazy" by Fine Young Cannibals.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It doesn't rhyme.
If you read the article it says Marsh didn't believe the database possible ..."until I read a story in J@pan Inc Magazine (June 26) about a company called Gracenote, which specializes in "music recognition service," the software that lets your CD player tell you which artist and track are currently playing."
As many of you know, Gracenote offers the CDDB service. It does not do any fancy music waveform checking. It checks song lengths and a few other points of data off a CD. It is only useful for CDs. CDDB, though it is handy for getting CD info, contains user-entered data, and often has duplicate entries. Using it for such a system as the author described would be a bad idea. At this point, the chances of a certain CD "matching" another in CDDB's eyes is higher than you might think. Sometimes, I'll put in a disc and have three or four separate albums come up.
± 29 dB
So there are 50000 melodies and thousads of ways of playing them
The courts aren't looking for "identical". They'll easily overlook the "thousads[sic] of ways of playing them" when applying the legal standard of "substantial similarity." My figure of 50,000 melodies was a statistical attempt to capture what it takes for two melodies to be "substantially similar."
Will I retire or break 10K?
that only means that there are 50,000 unique melodies in a legal sense. In an artistic sense there are millions.
In a legal sense, yerricde was on-topic: "Making and Detecting Illegal Music"
(Not to say that what I'm about to describe is what the referenced "illegal music" songs actually are. But this got me thinking.)
...
Jay-zus, people, can't you see that sampling without permission, and then selling the copies, is illegal for a reason?
Hmm... Resampling bits of another record and playing them at another speed. Using them as notes on a synthesizer keyboard, short riffs, or wildly off-speed as percussion elements.
How is that different from what rap music does? Sliding somebody else's record around on the turntable, playing sampled notes on a drum box,
Don't the major labels record rap music and sell it at a profit without giving a cent to the group that recorded the disk that's "weep-weep"ing in the foreground?
How many notes do you have to copy before it stops being fair use and starts being plagarism?
Is it more if the notes are warped beyond human recognition?
Is it more - or less - if your song is a parody of the form of which the original is a member?
Is it plagarism if the individual notes of your composition are sampled from some other song rather than played anew in a studio?
Is a song a "copy" if a stock riff common to many songs of the form happens to be sampled from a commercial recording rather than played anew in a studio - and this can be identified by computer processing but NOT by a human ear (even a well-trained one)?
These are not rhetorical questions. Some of them have already been litigated.
"Intellectual Property" - whether patents, copyrights, or trademarks - is a creation of The State. When combined with a right to free expression it creates a multitude of slippery slopes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's odd how the RIAA are stamping down on P2P but not on TAB and sheet music.
Published non-recorded copies of musical works are the NMPA's domain (national music publishers association), not the RIAA's (recording industry association of America). And yes, the NMPA does tag along when the RIAA sues P2P service operators.
Will I retire or break 10K?
..if it was impossible to trade mp3's(or .ogg or such), i'd be listening to .mods, .xm's , sids, and maybe midi's. i listened mostly to those (+radio) before mp3's.. great amounts of music available and cost was only downloading from some bbs, and those included some really good songs too.
streaming nectarine now..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I know in the UK there is a service called Shazam which you call up with your mobile phone, point your phone at a 'music source' for around 15 seconds and then you get a text message/SMS back around 30 seconds later showing a) the artist name (handy for 'cover versions) and b) the track name. It also has the facility (if you register) to 'store' your requests on its website and give appropriate links to online music stores.
It seems to work quite alright as well, I tested it by playing 2 tracks at once out my speakers - it correctly identified one of them (I thought it'll fail complete), I've tried it via the radio on a bus - again success, admiteddly it failed in a very crowded and noisy nightclub - but it's still damn good (and resonable cheap) for identifying music.
The claim that they can recognise 1.5million different tracks from just a 15 second second sample - I don't know how they do it though, but I know *I'm* impressed by the technology!
copying your favourite colour red off of a famous Van Gough painting..
I am sorry, we must confiscate all of your paintings. That particular colour of red has been used before.
The sounds you talk about (and people not liking) are because the listeners were TAUGHT to become familar with something else. So they are expecting a certain sound.
It is similar to world music. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to understand what is going on to enjoy.
I'm always amused when I read the Slashdot take on music and DRM. The /.ers bitch and moan about the RIAA (yeah they're evil) and MPAA (more evil) but not for the right reasons. They bitch because they want to steal from them. These guys own this music and as such should have a right to sell (at $10000 a CD if they choose), not sell, restrict use of, or do what ever with their songs. Yes I "said" their songs...they do own them even if they aren't the creators. It may be a corrupt system but the artists sold their stuff to these talentless thieves so it is their right to control their property.
That said the solution is simple. For consumers, don't buy their crap and don't listen to their hype and look for alternatives to cd purchases. Find bands and indie labels who distribute their music more cheaply or with ethics more in line with your own. Refuse to feed these thugs and eventually the system will change.
For artists, don't sell your soul to these bastards. Yeah, I know it means you make 1/100th of what you make now (optimistically) and the first guy to do it will probably be out of music forever but until large numbers boycott the system it will continue, and should. You can't complain about a system you support. Quit letting these worthless looters have all the gains of the producers. If you are creative and proactive and competent don't let them have your creations. Go on strike when your contracts are up refuse to feed those overgrown worthless parasites. Take away their food, after all you're the producer. Let them starve for talent and compete with them and eventually the system will change.
In the meantime, don't steal from them and don't rant about how art should be free, it's up to the owner what to make available and how. Learn what freedom means for a change instead of just using the word hollowly. Freedom is not having someone tell you what to do with your art, speach, code, whatever. Afford these Nazi bastards the same courtesy...even if they only own it because someone sold out to them (freely I might add). Create some art, instead of bitching (and no sampling is not creation, it's a bastardized hybrid of creation and imitation) and make your art free if you think it should be but don't make a mockery of freedom because you want free music.
BTW, my sister rant to this is against the RIAA & MPAA for outlawing legit tools becuase they might be misused so I'm not on the looter's side I just think both sides ought learn about the right to ownership before they raise their voices. This climate of going after people for producing (art, tools, software whatever) on both sides is sickening and stinks of Communism.
Goddammit, I used the notes C, D, E, and F again! Those `Happy Birthday' ladies (as well as everyone else) will probably sue me.
:-( *
As a songwriter, I often wonder: How the F*** am I supposed to compare my songs to the other one-million songs out there to see if they are `substantially similar?' Hell, any three-chord song sounds `substantially similar' to any other three-chord song.
I hereby renounce my title as a creator. Everything I could ever make (as music, as art, as writing, as code) has already been done and been copyrighted and/or patented. I will now slave away in a factory. Thank you for your time.
No, this is not a troll. This is simply a scared U.S. citizen.
*=Registered trademark of despair.com
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Don't the major labels record rap music and sell it at a profit
Yes.
without giving a cent
Cross-licensing agreements exist among the major record labels. These are analogous to what happens in other industries, where the big players pool their patents to keep newcomers out.
How many notes do you have to copy before it stops being fair use and starts being plagarism?
In legal theory, you infringe copyright when you copy enough to create a "substantial similarity." In practice, that's about four notes.
Is it plagarism if the individual notes of your composition are sampled from some other song rather than played anew in a studio?
They are "played anew" on a digital audio workstation, and they still infringe the songwriter's copyright.
Is a song a "copy" if a stock riff common to many songs of the form happens to be sampled from a commercial recording rather than played anew in a studio - and this can be identified by computer processing but NOT by a human ear (even a well-trained one)?
That's why the developers of the first PC clone BIOS made sure to employ and document clean room methods when writing a binary-compatible replacement for the IBM PC BIOS.
These are not rhetorical questions. Some of them have already been litigated.
Links would have been useful.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm sorry guys, but anyone who thinks that the solution to the scourge of intellectual property is to simply steal it, is either an idealist at best or simply a fool at worst.
The solution to the problem is to stop buying the product in the first place, if the album is good you will buy it, if it is bad you will not. Get rid of your illegal MP3s and OGGs and simply have music that you own. Wanna listen to some new music? Pay for it, or learn to play it.
Stealing it weakens the argument for cheaper music and enforces the perception that p2p networks simply share music for which people have no license. Rather than providing people with a useful way to share files on a heterogenus network.
I don't like MS products and licensing so I don't use them. I hate when people tell me that they think MS Office is much better than StarOffice, when the copy they have is stolen. If it's that good pay for it. The same is true for all intellectual property, we all think it is theft, we all would like to live in a state of pure anarchy, but none of you seem to be able to get to that enlightened level because of your greed. Free your mind and free your wallet, don't pay, don't listen.
If you think a lawsuit destroyed hiphop, you're more than white, you're missing the point.
if it was impossible to trade mp3's(or .ogg or such), i'd be listening to .mods, .xm's , sids, and maybe midi's.
Turning a recording into a .ogg file and distributing it infringes both the songwriter's and the performer's copyright.
Turning a song into a module file (mod, s3m, xm, it, mid+sf2) won't draw any fire from RIAA labels but will still infringe the songwriter's copyright. You still need a license from BMI or Harry Fox, depending on the intended use.
Writing your own music is harder than it looks because it's nearly impossible to avoid "substantial similarity" to the millions of songs out there.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think there are some basic misunderstandings in your post.
The most basic one if that economics, as a whole, does not talk about money. It talks about transfers of resources. Much of it talks about finite resources, which is why so much ill-informed debate goes on as we witness a previously finite resource become effectively infinite. Money (dollars, rubles, pesos, etc.) are extremely useful measures for talking about these things, but one must be careful to realize that they are simply proxies for understandings and agreements between people.
If I perform an action, and give the result to you, a transfer of value as occurred. If I give you a recording of your favorite artist, you are better off. I may be, because of implied agreements to get something in return. The artist is slightly better off in terms of being more well known, which may lead to you in some way benefiting them in the future. Some people think they are slightly worse off because we're engaging in a pattern of behaviour that does not involve a third party who by legal convention serves to broker such activites.
I think you can sort of work out the rest of my thoughts based on the premises above. In terms of sampling lots of things and "using it to make money", I wonder if you ever made a mix tape for someone. You probably did not get dollars from the person you gave it to, but you did at the very least expect to recieve value in some way or another (i.e., a mix tape in return, get laid, something).
-j
I forget what 8 was for.
Beyond two ! points, your post begins to resemble unsolicited commercial e-mail.
They can keep their wave table database much smaller if they keep all modern music sounding alike. Clever RIAA, very clever. In fact, the entire database covering the years 1992 to 2002 is comprised of 25 samples.
Been done.
If you ask nicely, I'll give you a good URL from where you can download it.
See also: illegal art, valenti cracks
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
But that does not make it unoriginal. Most Western music for the past 400 years has been created using the same essential building blocks. An infinite number of works can be made using this system. All the sounds, rythyms, etc may have existed before, and may have been used in another work before, but that does not mean entirely new combinations cannot be created. What you say is akin to dismissing a painting as unoriginal because the artist used the color red.
You shouldn't complain about bad rips if you don't contribute back to the MP3 scene. Napster/Morpheus/Audiogalaxy/Kazaa/WinMX/Blubster/ whatevers_new_this_week is not the MP3 scene.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
I'm sorry, how did you come to the conclusion that there are less than 50000 4-note melodies? When I think about this, I consider that this number depends on the tonal system and the rythmic figuration. The latter condition guarantees that there are actually an infinite number of 4-note melodies, even if the former does not. Legally, I suppose the question would be the number of melodies that people could distinguish as being different. This number depends on the person and is probably higher than you think. People with absolute pitch consider the same melody or even the same motive played at two different pitch level to be quite different, for instance.
I did use the standard p2p networks at some time. I was speaking of my experiences with them. I have moved on. My gut tells me though that the p2p networks are what will be targeted by the music giants, as they get the most illegal toons out to the most people. I am not going to argue what is the scene and what is not, but the masses will be targeted. p2p networks allow the average jow sixpack to get toons without buying them. db
it's the music itself that's illegal. Ironic, too, because it's not all that out of the question.
Just curious, but doesn't MP3 signifigantly alter a waveform when it chucks the parts you normally can't hear? It'd be like fingerprinting with half the prints missing or otherwised changed around, I'd imagine. Oh, I'm sure they could make a close approximation, but the an approximation isn't nessisarily going to hold up in a court.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That said, personally, I'm torn -- I don't like what the RIAA is doing, but still like some of their music. I mostly buy independent music these days. When I do want some RIAA stuff, I generally pirate it because it subverts their business model. They spend a lot of music up front to produce and promote music, and then I get it without giving them any money. I don't see any point in complaining about their attempts to stop this -- they're futile anyway.
-Esme
I listen to very little music from the last ten years. If you're talking about music older than that, the RIAA companies own every single significant recording.
You can't just go find free versions of Bach, Palestrina, Herbert Howells, Miles Davis, or Herbie Hancock. These are the genuises who made music evolve before our very eyes. Refusing to listen to them because the record companies are evil is to voluntarily stunt your own musical growth.
You mean like this?
http://decss.zoy.org/decss-sung.mp3
The capability to automatically identify the music from the waveform may be one of RIAA's priorities. However, is it a good thing? If a software can tell which music it is, it can also tell if someone is saying "I love the Al Qaeda", so it will be promptly adopted for counter insurgency purposes as well. Given this, can the ability to detect "No, I didn't vote for Dubya" be far behind?
four notes is the best statistical approximation of "substantially similar" that I have ever found. Do you have a better one?
Well, that's the thing. The law is deliberately left vague to allow the courts room to interpret. There is no set figure because in one case, four notes might be more than enough to indicate a copyright violation, whereas in another someone might get away with using ten.
The best advice is just to use your best judgment when sampling, at least if you plan on selling the work. If you think using a sample makes your music sound noticeably similar to the original, the courts probably would too.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
But then, every copyrighted music out there may not be copyrightable, due to prior art. For each sequence of four notes, search all melodies whose copyright has expired. If you can find that sequence in an old melody, then that music is not copyrightable.
"Anti-Piracy" database/recognizers are being marketed by more than one vendor. Here's Replicheck. I understand this technology will be applied to P2P networks too.
I'm afraid you missed the entire point of my comment, and I agree with you fully.
For Puff Daddy, the music thing is now a sideline. He's really an apparel designer, and a good one. See his new fall 2002 line, selling under the Sean John label. He's considered the most innovative designer in men's fashion right now. His stuff sells, too, unlike most other new ideas in menswear. It's not just runway fashion.
I'd love to hear the mix. Somebody must have caught the Solid Steel show and taped it.
Obviously somebody did, and put it on a CD for Dave Marsh and probably others. But for those of us not yet of the music legend that he is (said with all reverence), we have to snarf a bootleg copy from our local indie record shop or we search online.
the number of possible melodies is 3^11 == 177147
Actually, 3 symbols in an alphabet of 11 is 11^3 not 3^11.
Even then, what about a repeated attack (think beginning of Beethoven's fifth symphony)? I originally had 11 there, but then I remembered repeated attacks and added the unison interval for a total of 12.
But then, every copyrighted music out there may not be copyrightable
That issue is explored in the anti-Bono short story "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Legally, I suppose the question would be the number of melodies that people could distinguish as being different.
Watch it. Under United States copyright case law, the standard is "substantial similarity" not an exact match.
People with absolute pitch consider the same melody or even the same motive played at two different pitch level to be quite different, for instance.
Different but still substantially similar.
Will I retire or break 10K?
changing the duration of each note
Won't help much. The 46,656 figure already accounts for basic rhythm by allowing a note to be short, medium, or long. Do you think any finer gradations would make the melody no longer "substantially similar" to the original melody? And even if you do change the rhythm enough to create a different melody, now you're infringing on somebody else's copyright.
how much pressure applied, using the pedal, sharp or soft and probably more I can't think of.
All of which would be considered inconsequential, resulting in a melody that's still "substantially similar" and still infringing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If I write a C major chord into a piece of music do I suddenly owe somebody money? Its four notes (C, E, G, C) after all. This can't possibly be true. I mean; how many pieces of music have a scale built in? A trill? Chromatics? This would mean that everything in western music is a derivative work from somebody else and every artist and song writer owes somebody else money.
The best advice is just to use your best judgment when sampling
That may work for sampling, where it's possible to completely avoid liability by not using a particular recording, but it won't work for songwriting, where even if there are more than a million possible melodies, the sheer number of existing songs means that you are still likely to infringe accidentally.
The standard for proving copying under U.S. case law includes two components: substantial similarity, which we've discussed, and access to the original work. The "He's So Fine"/"My Sweet Lord" case destroyed the "independent creation" defense: the fact that a song was played on the radio during the defendant's lifetime constitutes proof of access to the work.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Lots of great (and ironically original) groups and DJs do lots of sampling, but rearrange the samples or cut them up into weird new unexpected beats.. and really redefine the sound.
Examples? DJ Shadow, Fat Boy Slim, Moby, Daft Punk.. there are a hundred examples.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Why? Because it's the exact same argument the very next guy uses and he's modded as an 'interesting'. Common, a little consistancy here? And he's absolutely right. Music is not open source as is the popular opinion. And late at night when Aunt Betty is asleep and i'm honest with myself, I have this tiny little fear: That the pirates- yes, you and I -Really are destroying the music industry. Oh, sure, the Labels are doing their part, but what is the long term effect this all has besides this RIAA crap? Well, I've thought of some...
Pirating really is like welfare. I can see people becoming so use to free music that it'll poison the industry. Joe has a few hit songs, but like most people, doesn't have the cash or the distibution infrastructure to get visibility. (and no, the internet is barely a viable option at this point) Unfortunately, neither do the labels anymore because all it takes is a dozen people to hit the net with any P2P program, and they're ass outta luck with near zero chance of defraying the cost. What happens? Joe is either really, really, really dedicated or he says I have a wife and kids to feed and drops the music gig. Now picture that on a large scale.
Now I'm not saying that this will happen 100% or the industry eventially won't eventially find other ways to make money off hits, but it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to a see a music recession on the rise because neither side will back down. And before I get any high and mighty replies about the evil empires raping us at the counter, I ask you this: What do you do if a department store gives you shitty service? Overprices their product? Oh, naturally you steal it off the shelf, right? Contrary to popular belief, you can change the industries behavior without resorting to THEFT... It just takes a lot of hard work and we're all lazy bastards.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I think the courtcase that was most relevant here was Vanilla Ice wasn't it? His big hit was a queen song with a good dance beat and his lyrics.
Frankly, I don't really care for that, but I do enjoy a lot of electronic music which also samples, and remixes existing music.
However, shouldn't "prior art" then be able to be argued in this case?
You said "argued". It's true that copyright protects only the original portions of a work, but if you don't have much money on hand, you can't afford to hire somebody to argue anything. Those without sufficient income to afford legal representation must steer clear of performing any action that anybody else could conceivably think of as infringing or defamatory.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seriously, why should they be able to stop people?
If I buy a copy of some mix CD that happens to sample Britney, surely records companies don't actually think they're missing out on a Britney sale? I'm not even a 'potential' customer, so they're not even losing a pretend "if it weren't for napster we would have sold 10 trillion copies of the latest Backstreet boys album, therefore napster has to pay us <pinkypoint to="mouth">one hundred trillion dollars</pinkypoint>"-type sale.
Most Western music for the past 400 years has been created using the same essential building blocks.
Right. If you play them all backwards in a tape player, you get your wife back, you get your truck back, and you get your dog back. Granted, it wasn't nessecairly trucks back then, it might have been a mule team, or a wagon, or a ship, but yeah, pretty much the same.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
mp3s of Negativland's original "U2" single is available here. Top of the page. "The forbidden single"
I heard the LAME song on Rush Hour 2, where Piddly Diddly samples a LAME STINK song, only to make an even LAMER song. We should burn all Piddly Diddly CD's!
Also, I doubt he ever designed anything. He just hired people to do it...
http://www.negativland.com/audio.html
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
It's wrong?
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
While I do agree that the large mass of weenies trading on Open Nap or Gnutella have crappily encoded songs (Mostly from windows encoders.. the ONLY windows encoder that is worth a damn is LAME+EAC... everything else is utter crap) and I cant tell you about KAzaa as I dont use that out-of-date Operating system called windows or the spyware called Kazaa. But I highly doubt that your rant and wildly overstatement on their quality is true. Yes they suck, but only as sucky as what you hear on an FM radio stations. I encode everything with Lame at 160kbps at a quality setting of ZERO which forces the use of the best and slowers encoder codec. creating an mp3 at 160k that is the same sonic quality as windows media player or audiocatilist set at highest quality VBR.
and these are what I trade... nicely clean with no lame "R1pped by G00337 d00d" and correct Id3 tag information...
anyone that does less than what I do is a poser, or moron, or just plain stupid as a sack of rocks.
.. the white label industry in the UK..
This is how it works. There aren't that many record pressing plants in the UK. 99% of them require copyright approval before they will scribe their ID onto the trailer on a piece of vinyl. If this database get's used, i'd say 75% of material that gets submitted for approval will get refused now, compared to maybe 15-20% that gets rejected nowadays.
In your typical UK record shop, 50-60% of vinyl's hanging on the wall are white labels made by new up-and-coming producers (bedroom dj's usually).. They whack a tune together, do an old remix, and knock it out. They never sell more than 500 copies. I know this, from experience. Even some of the larger (self) labels don't sell more than 1,000 presses. Why do they get so shitty about this? It costs approx £500 to manufacture 500 vinyls, single-sided, white label, including mastering/metalwork costs. They sell them for £3 sale-or-return to record shops. Wow, if they sell all 500, they may earn themselves a grand. Is that really worth all this copyright shit? Any decent record label (that would be capable of selling large quantities) would never let bad material go out the door anyway, so it shouldn't matter.
This is just another sign of how petty the industry is going, like internet broadcasting. If all pressing plants start doing this, the underground music scene will suffer and only 'commercial' music on large labels will continue to exist.
"Never let the truth get in the way of a good story..."
This article has *nothing* to do with supporting or not supporting large record companies. It has to do with antiquated copyright laws, enforced rigidly by the big companies, that stifle artistic creativity. This is all independent of whether you buy their music or not.
Like why will the pressing plant refuse to press the CDs if they're found to contain samples of copywritten music? It's in their legal right to make these CDs, just not to charge for them. The act of pressing the CDs doesn't violate the law.
Big Music Money seems to have misunderstood the important nature of sampling ("quotation", to use the musicology term for it) that's come out of art in the 20th century. To say that all artistic output is created in a vacuum devoid of influence (which can be heard, directly or indirectly) is absolutely ignorant of creative processes.
No one sued Stravinsky for using Dylan Thomas lyrics, Charles Ives for quoting every popular and church song of the times, Warhol for Monroe's face.
But that's all beside the point. The CD pressing plant here is the point. The Plunderphonics lawsuits are the point. When the record companies use their muscle to prevent people from creating what's within their legal rights to do so, then there's a problem.
McCallum
mentalfloss.ca/sintheta
OMG I would have never seen this comment coming. Pac-Man Fever, whoa, I haven't thought of that song since it was popular in the early 80's. What's worse is that just remembered that I still have that song on vinyl somewhere. That one was better left to forgotten history man.
If people stop buying big-label music and buy unknown bands, the big labels will go out of business. But it takes effort to break our advertising-induced buying habits. Most people would rather rationalize their own laziness.
If more people would put their money and effort where their mouths are and take the time to look for non-label bands, they would find bands they like just as much as the ones that have been spoon-fed to them. There is a ton of excellent music freely available from the bands themselves, which the labels have absolutely no control over and can't touch you for downloading. Finding it on doesn't even take that much more effort than bitching on /.