In don’t think anyone mentioned a listing of all possible melodies either, and if you think something they did mention is functionally equivalent, it would help if you made that explicit.
Algorithmically generated music is not such a list, and does not involve publishing such a list, as no one would want that. They typically involve a lot of selection and choices by the author. They’re only algorithm-generated on the sense that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was “brush-generated”.
My comment was in the context of OP's video. The Youtube description of that video states, "I sat down to talk with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to copyright every possible melody." (emphasis added)
The video shows that the authors wrote a program to enumerate every possible melody up to a certain size, possibly narrowed by some criteria. A list like that should be as entitled to copyright protection as a list of the first million prime numbers.
Where an algorithm is used as a tool for creativity, I agree that the resulting work should be copyrightable because an algorithm can be like a brush in the hands of an artist. Here, however, that is not the case because the algorithm used simply lists all melodic possibilities and there is no creative input whatsoever.
>My comment was in the context of OP's video. The Youtube description of that video states, "I sat down to talk with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to copyright every possible melody." (emphasis added)
which makes no mention of any of those points, so I’m not sure I understand why you thought that was the right place to put your comment, or why the connection would have been clear. I think that would have been better as a top level reply, with the relevant part quoted, as you’ve done here.
FWIW, since it was my comment he was replying to, I understood the relevance and connection just fine. He was supplying additional reasons as to why it was not copyrightable.
Good to hear! Not having that context, it just looked like the all-too-common "I'm going to show off my knowledge of the topic despite its dubious relevance".
And yes, I know, "you should watch the video/read the article before commenting and then you'd know the context", but usually it's much easier on everyone for the commenter to just take three seconds to indicate what they're addressing, rather than expect everyone else to blow the ten minutes of their life just for a chance to guess at it.
(For that matter, the title would have been better as "Copyrighting every possible melody...".)
In any case, it was especially confusing since it seemingly had nothing to do with your comment, about algorithmically generated music, which generally refers to something else besides publishing an entire domain (rather than the composer-selected best elements).
Algorithmically generated music is not such a list, and does not involve publishing such a list, as no one would want that. They typically involve a lot of selection and choices by the author. They’re only algorithm-generated on the sense that the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was “brush-generated”.