Copyright law, the internet and musical theft are all deeply intertwined. For years musicians have cried out against the piracy of their music, and even longer than that there have been allegations of other musicians lifting their melodies. With copyright laws, and those who abuse them becoming ever more prevalent, many musicians and artists across the world have feared that technology could potentially step on the fire of artistic creativity. In what sounds like the start of a bad joke, a programmer, a lawyer, and a musician banded together to create an algorithm that would open the dam of creativity for musicians and hopefully curb the endless litigation against musicians online.
Writing for The Independent, Anthony Cuthbertson chronicled major past instances of musical copyright strikes, and detailed why the aforementioned algorithm aimed to end such things. Working together, Riehl and Rubin wrote a program “capable of generating 300,000 melodies each second, creating a catalogue of 68 billion 8-note melodies”. Such actions could be used maliciously, particularly by copyright trolls to infringe on creatives by claiming since they wrote the melody first, and copyrighted it, that the musician must cease and desist. In this story, however, the group decided to copyright all 68-billion melodies and release them into the public domain. Reihl notes that musical notation does indeed have an upper limit and therefore any artist is “liable to patterns being repeated unintentionally” in their music. This thought is what ultimately pushed him to help create the algorithm and “allow future songwriters to make all of their music” without fear of copyright.
In recent times, musicians have had the opportunity to come up through different channels. The largest of these new avenues has certainly been YouTube and in some genres SoundCloud. The issue with what would have been two great tools for spreading music is that the developers at both sites have come down hard on copyright infringement. There is an ongoing battle against these sites, because they have an “act first, differentiate later” style of striking. YouTube is notorious for using a relatively inefficient algorithm to demonetize and even remove channels from the site based on what it deems incorrect use of copyrighted material. They remove the channel, and then the channel owner must jump through seemingly endless loops to get the channel back even if it was blatant that the program misunderstood what it deemed as copyrighted material. While there is a clear need for policing what is posted on sites as open as YouTube and SoundCloud, there should be more care taken in how these algorithms decide to remove channels and posts. Everyday it isn’t hard to find someone online complaining that the YouTube algorithm ruined their lively hood because they used a handful of seconds of copyrighted music, which is covered under fair use. These companies have given in to the temptation that if the loss of human touch by using a complete automated policing approach means more money, its worth it. If you ask any of the creators making music, film and many other endeavors they will wholeheartedly disagree.
Source Article: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/music-copyright-algorithm-lawsuit-damien-riehl-a9364536.html
Social Structures & Algorithms 