Image: TEDx, Damien Riehl
In an attempt to stop music copyright lawsuits, Damien Rhiel and Noah Rubin, two programmer musicians algorithmically generated every possible 8 note, 12-beat melody combo and saved them to a hard drive. Once in tangible format, the work is considered copyrighted however because the MIDI data is numbers, and numbers are considered as facts in copyright law which have thin or no copyright claim, the music may be considered not copyrightable. They subsequently released the music data under creative commons, in the hope than further music copyright lawsuits that contest on melody alone could be thrown out of court.
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