It starts a bit like the beginning of a corny joke: „A lawyer and a coder meet at a bar and because they’re also passionate musicians, they came up with an idea to end all copyright litigations in pop-music.“

Nolan Ruben and Damien Riehl created a software tool that generated approximately 69 billion melodies according to specified criteria. All melodies were then uploaded to the internet under the Creative Commons Zero licence, making them free to use. As claimed by the authors, this reduced a likelihood of copyright infringement among musicians and put an end to disputes over the authorship of popular melodies. The artists will no longer argue about who copied from whom, as the authors of all imaginable melodies are Ruben and Riehl and they provided them to everyone free of charge.

While this idea sounds appealing to many musicians and the news have been covered in the media throughout the world, in practice, nothing has probably happened. Ruben and Riehl are undoubtedly the authors of the source code for the computer program, but they are almost certainly not the authors of any of the 69 billion melodies. The definitions of an author’s work always contain the provision that it must be the result of the author’s creative activity. The work of an algorithm operating on the basis of brute-force can hardly be considered a creative activity. As the name suggests, it is merely generating all conceivable combinations by a brute force, that lacks the element of uniqueness and originality.
Thus, all melodies generated in this way are not subject to copyright at. Otherwise, it would be an infringement of other artists' copyrights, as we can expect that a significant part of the 69 billion melodies has been already used in many well-known or unknown compositions long before Ruben and Riehl's experiment. As a result, it is more of a PR stunt of the above mentioned couple and not a serious contribution to the debate as to whether it is time to change the current concept of copyright because of the development of technology.