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Comments (78)

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  Giefo6ah
  If you live in the USA, the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.Don't bring attention to yourself by asking for permission. Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.If you want the world to benefit from your code but you don't want to be responsible for it, try to adapt the codec to ffmpeg. The ffmpeg project is used to dealing with these matters, and will keep your codec working for eternity.
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  jdlshore
  Don’t ask Hacker News for legal advice. If you really want to know the answer, ask a lawyer.
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  brudgers
  You are free to interpret this comment as prohibition or as my blessing, but...If it matters, ask your lawyer.If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.Or to put it another way, trademarks (you've mentioned two) and copyrights (it's a crapshoot) are complex. And in some jurisdictions (notably the US) anybody can sue anyone for anything.Your risk aversion is yours, not someone else's. Your financial and legal wherewithal is likewise yours.
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  arjie
  The nature of these tools is that your post and the device should suffice to replicate so in some sense you have already published the encoder and the decoder.
• Scaevolus
  Aside: if you want a source of high quality Piano MIDI recordings, you should check out the MAESTRO dataset: https://magenta.withgoogle.com/datasets/maestro> The dataset contains about 200 hours of paired audio and MIDI recordings from ten years of International Piano-e-Competition. The MIDI data includes key strike velocities and sustain/sostenuto/una corda pedal positions. Audio and MIDI files are aligned with ∼3 ms accuracy and sliced to individual musical pieces, which are annotated with composer, title, and year of performance. Uncompressed audio is of CD quality or higher (44.1–48 kHz 16-bit PCM stereo).
• altairprime
  Your intentions can reasonably be interpreted by a court as attempting to avoid paying a commercial software licensing fee. Use of Fable is, in your specific instance, irrelevant to whatever the outcome would be; the finding of intent holds plausible regardless of what tools and/or contractors you used to pursue your intent. Seek legal counsel if you wish to publish. (I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
• bambax
  > some music from Eric Satre, a 19th century French composer> Gymnopedie No 1Eric (or as he preferred, Erik) SATIE.
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  layer8
  Rather than publishing the decoder and/or encoder, it would be more interesting to publish how the decoy scheme works in detail. We want to understand how things work, not blindly use tools that we could build ourselves based on that understanding.
• noduerme
  I'm sorry, I'm hung up on the idea that an LLM could look at a midi file and listen to something and write an improved version with better sustain. Did you feed it other midi files, or was this something it was able to accomplish by parsing raw audio of Piano Man?
• sandos
  Recently had a similar, but likely more severe problem: I noticed Sol decompiled some proprietary code to re-implement some functionality for an emulation I wanted to use internally.Now its likely soiled and I have to throw it away. Doh! I asked it about legality and it went "its almost green" but when googling, reverse-enginnering like that seems very illegal.The weird thing is in this case, it could have pretty easily gotten the needed info from using the code as a black box, and that is apparently legal!
• reilly3000
  Gymnopedie No 1 was one of the pieces I learned as a primary school student as a mediocre and undedicated pianist. The reverse engineering is impressive and generally useful, but really learning that piece all the way through could be even more rewarding, then you can use 10 fingers and two feet to make it sound like YOUR ultimate version, not just your words. Perhaps Claude truly nailed it in your taste and you want to be able to reproduce it reliably without automation: record one phrase at a time and try to minimize the about of variance between yours and the MIDI. Maybe some visual feedback would help and be clever, but usually using your ear is the most productive.
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  gbnwl
  This is a nit but his name is actually Erik Satie not Eric Satre.
• RobotToaster
  Have fable "accidentally" escape containment and publish it.
• adam_klein
  You can always publish the prompts.
• franky47
  typo: did you mean Erik Satie?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie
• xyst
  yea - just publish it
• NordStreamYacht
  Why not publish the methodology in detail and leave it at that?
• doawoo
  Did you really need to ask a massive LLM and burn tokens on this?? A few minutes of googling has revealed a huge amount of this information just laying out in the open, and, a whole tool to author your own files that someone sells as independent software! (https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/)
• dostick
  So Fable can act by itself as audio to midi decoder now? No need for specialised models, it just listens like a person and plays it?
• NegativeLatency
  Personally I’d just do it
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  Redster
  IANAL, but it might be relevant to others trying to answer what jurisdiction you are in. (US, EU, CN, JP, elsewhere?)Also, when you bought from PianoDisc, did you agree to abide by a certain jurisdiction's laws in your use of PianoDisc? And did you explicitly agree to not share any sort of decoder/encoder in any ToS?
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  natch
  You bought a hardware device and you own that device?This decoy notes scheme seems pretty unethical.
• kriro
  Maybe send this question to the Anthropic legal team. I'd be curious if you get an answer and what it'll be.
• nmeofthestate
  You should just ask AI, since you used AI to make the encoder and write your HN post.
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  ryandrake
  Find someone in Europe or Australia, or some other place with non-insane digital laws, and have that person publish it as the “developer.”
• toilet
  Erik Satie
• anon
  undefined
• dbgrman
  Another option that works quite well is called FAFO. So, I'd say just publish it, and we'll see. Keep us posted!
• philosopherNoob
  If I ever owned a self-playing piano, figuring out how I could play custom songs of my own creation would be my top priority. It’s awesome you’ve found some success. Jmpman, what your post is missing is motivation. Why are you doing this and what is your goal?If you sell your decoder or encoder the company will, eventually, kick your butt. Getting money involved raises the stakes.If you distribute a file that is sold by the company, even if it was transformed by a decoder, the company will, eventually, kick your butt. (A recording or sample of how it sounds post-transformation for demonstration purposes would be reasonable.)If your software requires files that must be paid for in order to function, then it’s critical that you do not bundle those files with your decoder or encoder. That would be piracy.How your software was made matters. Did you have access to non-public information about anything involved? It seems like the answer is no, so you might be fine. It sounds like you legally obtained a copy of the file, hardware that runs it, and figured out how they work.What terms of service did you agree to? While not everything listed may hold up in court (which gets determined BY a court IN a court so don’t think that’s an easy win), the company is surely within their rights to ban you from their online service.If you want some relevant legal advice, check out the GameCube Dolphin emulator and how the team stays legal. I love learning about how stuff works, so I’ve followed lots of console jailbreaking and reverse engineering news for years. There is a way to do this stuff legally. HN is focused more on finance than hacking. So talk to some hackers (who aren’t trying to break the law).I saw you ask about contacting the company. If this was a blog, I’d love a followup about what they say and do, but alas I’ll probably never see it. (I guess the worst outcome is that they spend more money on making their proprietary stuff more locked down?) Regardless of what they say, their word is not the law. Know the law, know your rights, and know when it’s safe to stick your neck out and when it’s not. I am obviously not a lawyer.Oh, and which US state you are in and what they are based in will be relevant.
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  worthless-trash
  You publish it as the organ-guy piano system for a virtual piano that you've lost the code for.On a serious note: reverse engineering is legal in australia, even for DMCA violations.
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  xgulfie
  I'm your lawyer, you should do it
• Veai
  [dead]
• sdoering
  [dead]
• tmpsvc2695f5
  [dead]
• profsummergig
  Should've asked Fable.
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  dmarinus
  my experience with LLMs is that when you get answers to questions you didn't ask that it's repeating something that already exists. In other words, it probably regenerated a tool from which it was trained on.