Copyright and Life Plus 50 Years - What is Life?
The question that hit me today is: If a computer program creates music, how long does the copyright last?
I write about copyright. It has been one of the things I've been pushed into since we had our early ISP, Wimsey. The typical length of a copyright is life plus 50 years. Some countries are pushing this to life plus 70 years. Leaving aside the various arguments pro and con on the actual length, let's talk about "life" in this context.
The question popped into my mind as I was reading this article on the work of David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus in music. He has created a program that can write chorales in the spirit of Bach such that most people can't tell which was written by the software running on a machine and which are original Bach works.
Maybe the life is "life of the author of the software" or maybe it is "the copyright period of the software" (which is author's life plus 50 years) - which would make the copyright on the music created be David Cope's life plus 50 years (the author) plus another 50 years for the "life" of the software. Kind of a second order "life" time.
So what do we do when the software is declared to be alive? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting close - at least we have not yet given up on it. At what point do we fall off the cliff of speculation into the reality of having created life from software - and how long will it live?
Our copyright laws need to take this into consideration - especially since Emmy, the name of the music writing software, wrote 5,000 Bach-inspired pieces in the time it took David to go out for a sandwich. A couple of dozen such machines could saturate all the various genres of music with works in a matter of days, locking other composers out of earning a living.
Think about it. I'm really musing on (literally) Life.
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