US law in this area is interesting. There is no "sweat of the brow" copyright in the US. This was clearly established in Feist vs. Rural Telephone, the Supreme Court decision that it was permissible to copy data from telephone books into a database. The Constitution gives Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", and the Supreme Court says Congress can't go beyond that in intellectual property law. The US, therefore, has no database copyright, although some countries do.
This was followed by the famous Bridgeman vs. Corel, which established that taking a picture of a work doesn't create a new copyright. Thus, pictures of public domain works are public domain. Despite much huffing and puffing and disinformation by the museum community, that's now settled law. Nobody has gone to court to try to overturn it. (The National Portrait Gallery (UK) threatened to sue Wikipedia, then backed down once they realized they would lose.) There's also Meshwerks vs Toyota; a 3D scan of a physical object doesn't create a new copyright in the 3D scan. That's an appellate decision and reaffirmed Bridgeman.
So, for copyright in the US, there must be an Author. (This can be a corporation, but that comes under the law on work-for-hire; the individuals involved are the initial authors but the rights accrue to the employer.) You can make a strong argument that under US law, works created by computers are not copyrightable.
> You can make a strong argument that under US law, works
> created by computers are not copyrightable.
I'm genuinely not sure what "works created by computers" means.
I don't know exactly how Jukedeck works, but it seems self evident that it is the product of a huge number of creative decisions - which sound samples to include or generate, which sounds can be combined in a pleasing way, which melodic patterns are appropriate for various genres, how melodic patterns are modulated over time, etc. etc.
It's not as if the Jukedeck team created a general purpose AI and said "go make some music". They designed a system that can generate a limited (though large) range of music based on their own sense of creativity, taste and style. I argue that the music generated by such a system is clearly creative expression and thus subject to copyright to the same degree as traditional creative expression.
I do not think "sweat of the brow" decisions are relevant here. The lack of "sweat of the brow" copyright means that simply performing labor without a creative element does not qualify the product of that labor for copyright protection. There must be a creative spark present in the generation or transformation of the work.
The fact that, with Jukedeck, the creative spark happens at the time of producing and editing the code rather than at the time of the code generating the music is not relevant in my opinion.
Digital tools are used all the time by artists to create works that they own. Doesn't this count as a more complex tool to generate digital works that they own?
Kind of like a studio letting you use their equipment under a prior agreement that anything you generate they own until you purchase it.
This was followed by the famous Bridgeman vs. Corel, which established that taking a picture of a work doesn't create a new copyright. Thus, pictures of public domain works are public domain. Despite much huffing and puffing and disinformation by the museum community, that's now settled law. Nobody has gone to court to try to overturn it. (The National Portrait Gallery (UK) threatened to sue Wikipedia, then backed down once they realized they would lose.) There's also Meshwerks vs Toyota; a 3D scan of a physical object doesn't create a new copyright in the 3D scan. That's an appellate decision and reaffirmed Bridgeman.
So, for copyright in the US, there must be an Author. (This can be a corporation, but that comes under the law on work-for-hire; the individuals involved are the initial authors but the rights accrue to the employer.) You can make a strong argument that under US law, works created by computers are not copyrightable.