Computers Making Music – Who Owns the Copyright?
GrindEFX is back, w00t! Over at Techdirt, Michael Masnick highlights an interesting development in machine-generated music: a company claims to have created software that can recreate musical performances by famous musicians, living or dead.
As described on the blog, “Zenph Studio’s approach is to work out how the musician and the instrument acts and responds, then get a computer to play that track again as a real-time, real-life performance, which in turn can be recorded using modern techniques.”
It’s essentially MIDI on steroids. Zenph claims that through its software process, it can capture the nuances of any performer’s style and translate that into an algorithm to generate new recordings of old songs – or make entirely new songs that sound like they were performed by a famous musician.
Leaving aside whether this is a good idea in the first place – how long before we have Kurt Cobain hawking deodorant? - Masnick concludes with what I can only describe as an excellent law school final exam question -
So, now, take this software that supposedly can perfectly mimic a certain musician’s playing, and have it record a song. Say it’s a new song. Who owns the copyright? What if it’s adding John Lennon to a Rolling Stone’s song? Who owns the copyright? What if it’s an old song, updated in some slight way? Who owns the copyright? What if it’s just the same song but “remastered”? Who owns the copyright? The legal questions raised by this kind of software are going to keep copyright lawyers busy for a long, long time.
Being the slightly sadomasochistic law student I am, I couldn’t resist analyzing the issues raised in this situation. I am not a lawyer, and this article is only for general informational purposes; nothing here constitutes legal advice.
Recent Comments