I’m reminded of lawyer Damien Riehl’s (performative) reaction to the Sam Smith infringement decision, back in 2019/2020. He and programmer Noah Rubin algorithmically generated every possible melody (within a certain combinatorial space, in MIDI format as I recall), and purported to release them under CC-0 license [0]. He went on to attract some attention and explain his argument at a regional TEDx event [1].

I seem to recall legal commentators reacting with an eyeroll—apparently judges split much finer hairs than these for a living—but it was a cute stunt.

[0] https://allthemusic.info/

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU and https://www.the-independent.com/tech/music-copyright-algorit...

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pfdietz 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Copyrights are a bit different from patents.

	▲	alwa 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		For sure, but I suspect the law might look similarly dimly on the argument that “machines systematically generated all possibilities in the problem space” === “somebody already had this idea.” I’d imagine maybe by reading specific human intention into “prior art” and “existing work” and those sorts of terms. Which is not to say let’s not do it anyway and see!