Musicians must avoid any melody that’s ever been written, or they can be sued. This can occur even if they have never heard the other song before, or maybe they did hear it many years ago and forgot it. It’s actually possible for artists to be sued for subconsciously infringing on another’s work.
Damien Riehl is a copyright attorney who also happens to be a musician and a programmer. He noticed the injustice in this and called upon the help of fellow musicians and programming genius Noah Rubin to create every musical melody that could ever possibly be written to protect musicians from being sued.
As Riehl explains, there are only so many melodies and so many notes that can possibly be written. Yet this doesn’t stop the law or a jury from finding musicians “guilty” of stealing musical melodies. Which is what happened to George Harrison.
He was accused of taking the melody from the Chiffon’s song “He’s So Fine” and George Harrison’s song “My Sweet Lord” from the same Melodic Dataset. Even though that wasn’t Harrison’s intent, it didn’t matter because the songs shared the same melody.
As Riehl explains, music can be broken down to just 8 notes, so the probability of songs containing the same melody is very high. He said each song can contain up to 10 melodies.
What Rubin did was write a program that made every melody that has ever existed or ever can exist. Then he and Riehl put all of these melodies in the public domain so they can hereby be used by musicians so they cannot be sued for using them to make their music.
As Riehl points out in his TEDx talk, SoundCloud currently has more than 200 million songs and adds 50 million new songs per year. This shrinks the number of possibilities for new melodies, which will exhaust the number of creative possibilities.
Many who have been challenged or were being sued for stealing another’s melody have made that artist a co-songwriter on their material just to avoid the lengthy court battle and share some of the royalties. Currently, if an artist chooses to fight this in court, it’s damn near impossible for a songwriter to prove they didn’t steal the melody. Riehl shared Katy Perry’s case.
Katy Perry disputed ever hearing a song before Marcus Gray accused her of stealing their work. They even agreed that maybe she didn’t hear it, but they had over 3 million YouTube views. The jury ended up siding with the accuser, and Katy Perry had to pay $2.8 million.
In hopes of helping prevent this from happening to artists in the future, they released all the melodies using a Creative Commons Zero License, meaning they have “no rights reserved.” As Riehl ended his talk, he summed things up by saying,
“[We] have made all the melodies and put them into the public domain, in an effort to give songwriters more freedom, to be able to make more and more music and less fear of accidentally stepping on a musical landmines. Noah and I have made all the music to be able to allow future songwriters to make all of their music.”
In a recent turn of events, Katy Perry has won a reversal of the decision based on the very concept of the premise that the sequence of notes in the song were not unique, proving that it is indeed possible to protect musicians in this manner. Judge Christina A. Snyder issued the reversal and wrote,
“A relatively common 8-note combination of unprotected elements that happens to be played in a timbre common to a particular genre of music cannot be so original as to warrant copyright protection.”
The melodies they generated, along with the code for the algorithm they used, are open-sourced and can be found on allthemusic.info, and the datasets on Internet Archive.
