Every Melody Has Been Copyrighted (and they're all on this hard drive)

Those are precisely the objections I'd raised with the Damien Rhiel (submitted via email, no response). Additionally there's the problem of releasing the works to the public domain. As discussed a couple of weeks ago when the 2016 billion-dollar infringement lawsuit against Getty Images was attempted ... and thrown out of court ... the act of putting works in the public domain also extinguishes, in the court's eyes, the rights of the author to sue for any claims including moral claims of authorship . See: [link] So: clever stunt, but legally impotent, both by law and the self-neutering actions of the actors here. Adam Neely's video (interviewing Rhiel and collaborator Noah Rubin) covers many points of copyright, though not the originality, authorship, or PD angles. (Posted elsewhere in thread, echoing here.) [this video]

Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin have all the melodies on a hard drive. (More info in this Adam Neely video: [this video] and the TED talk linked in a nearby comment.) So depending on a court's kinda arbitrary definition of creativity on any given day, all of them may or may not be copyrighted already. An infringement being accidental also doesn't seem to stop copyright holders from successfully suing people. I think this means you could technically be successfully sued for dropping some bricks on a piano, since no matter where they land, the action constitutes a public performance of a copyrighted work. Fun stuff.