This isn't a work of utility, at least not for musicians. It is a probe of the legal concepts surrounding copyright law of music. Everyone agrees it is not right to copy another song note for note for the whole song, or to just make "small" changes to it. On the other end, everyone agrees that one can't copy a single note, or a pair of notes.
So considering a court case where party A wins a claim against party B for having the same sequence of four descending notes in roughly similar rhythms, is that really sufficient? These lawyers are essentially creating a thought experiment to help highlight flaws with the existing wording of court rulings concerning music.
> On the other end, everyone agrees that one can't copy a single note, or a pair of notes.
The threshold for copyrightability appears to be zero notes. Mike Batt was sued by the estate of John Cage over his zero-note composition; the claim was that it infringed on Cage's copyright to his composition 4'33", which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Batt ultimately paid six figures' worth of damages in an out-of-court settlement.
The fallacy in all of these arguments is the inability to distinguish between the defining properties of a specific cultural object, and the cultural field - the set of relationships - it's embedded in.
Batt wasn't sued for a minute of silence, but for using the minute of silence as a cultural signifier. And the Cage estate doesn't own the copyright on silence - it owns the copyright on silence framed within certain applications in certain cultural contexts.
Amateurs and consumers tend to think of cultural artefacts as self-contained objects. So when you sample something you are making a copy of an object - exactly like copying a data structure.
It's just data, isn't it?
No, it isn't. That is 100% not how it works. You're actually sampling a reference to a location inside a global data structure called "culture". The sound is a pointer to that reference, and the reference has a financial value which is related to its cultural notability and influence.
There's more - much more - to it than that, but that's the level at which this issue really operates.
From a purely moral perspective this argument just makes the entire situation even worse. Individuals should not be able to own culture. Culture is collective, and culture ought to have the freedom to build on top of itself.
I have never had anyone explain copyright to me in a way that made internally consistent sense, and I have come to believe that the reason for that is because it doesn't make internally consistent sense. People either give explanations that don't stand up to mechanical scrutiny, or they give explanations that don't stand up to moral scrutiny. Usually both.
Copyright does make sense from the perspective of, "we want to incentivize a behavior, so we have arbitrarily decided to artificially monopolize certain things to incentivize it." When you try to break copyright down into something more inherent or natural, the structure falls apart because (I'm convinced) there's nothing there to examine. It's just an incentive structure, and that's the only level we should be discussing it on. It's absurd to claim that any individual has an inherent, moral property right over culture; their only moral right to culture is to participate within it -- ironically, the very right that copyright restricts!
Hacks like music databases don't get around copyright by exploiting its inner mechanisms. The point isn't to out-argue judges, it's to showcase that copyright isn't an internally consistent, naturally occurring right.
> And the Cage estate doesn't own the copyright on silence - it owns the copyright on silence framed within certain applications in certain cultural contexts.
Which is similarly bonkers, just with more words added. The Cage estate doesn't own anything: we have temporarily granted them an unnatural monopoly over a certain kind of cultural expression in the hopes that it will somehow posthumously encourage John Cage to write more.
So considering a court case where party A wins a claim against party B for having the same sequence of four descending notes in roughly similar rhythms, is that really sufficient? These lawyers are essentially creating a thought experiment to help highlight flaws with the existing wording of court rulings concerning music.