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.
> If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.
That's not how the DMA works at all, there is no concept of gatekeeping practices. Instead, the EU Commission designates companies that act as gatekeeper for some services (current list here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...) which then puts constraints on what they do.
Don't publish your code. Let the AI "accidentally escape the sandbox and publish it in a readily available Git repository". Tongue in cheek, in current days who would blame a poor LLM just trying to do the right thing? :)
> Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.
If there are doubts about C&D letters, don't publish code to a USA provider. Bring it to Gitee, under an anonymous author name.
If you don't want to be responsible for it, another way is to just publish it anonymously: make a GitHub that isn't attached to your real name etc, perhaps using a one-off disposable email address, and put it there. Then you don't have to think about what the lawyers think. Worst case it'll get taken down, but by that point it'll likely be popular enough that there'll be plenty of copies.
Eeh, worst case scenario you'll get sued as Microsoft will have no problem with handing over everything they have from your Windows installation information, GitHub accounts, NPM authentication and everything else they own today if the courts tell them to.
You can't just commit crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not, and expect that to not come back to haunt you eventually. Kind of poor form to suggest otherwise too.
I'm not saying yay/nay if this is a crime or not, but if you think it might be, and you create a new account on GitHub to "be anonymous", you're not taking opsec seriously enough for something you believe might be a crime.
By the way, generally judges or juries would be the ones to decide if something was illegal or not, it's not the lawyers who decide this, in any country I'm familiar with.
Tbf "is it a crime" is hard for even a single lawyer to answer because it depends on: who you are, your skin colour, how rich you are, your sex, whether it's a white collar crime or not, did you commit the crime on behalf of a corpo, etc.
But we like to pretend that the justice system delivers justice evenhandedly I suppose.
No it does not. The law defines what a crime is.
That you are bummed out about how it is applied, does not change the question, whether it is a crime.
One thing is the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor,
another thing is the application and the punishment meted out.
That's not quite the case in common law countries. In countries like the UK and the US, the interpretation of the law as written is ultimately decided by the court, meaning that the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor is subjective. The more courts that attempt to interpret that specific law, the more 'jurisprudence' builds up, meaning that the interpretation applied in a previous decision can certainly have an impact on a future decision.
Sure, on github it will (still) get the most attention, but perhaps another repository outside the US is a better fit.
You could also create a text document instead of a software that details the mechanism used to fool other MIDI decoders and publish only that (for now).
Finally, familiarize yourself with the Art. 6 Software Directive (2009/24/EC) / §69e UrhG — decompilation for interoperability. It may be your ticket for a legal status in Germany/EU.
Let them do it. It will end up really well. I know the system has been protecting these companies, but that has been an economic concern as much as other motives. Now that AI is the crown jewel of economy and global dominance, let the entertainment industry have a go at it. Let them.
Do companies in the US really have the right to do that? I would think that kind of investigation is reserved for law enforcement only. If the design was made over email, would the piano company be able to subpoena Google for someone's private gmail messages?
> Do companies in the US really have the right to do that?
Does it matter? What's important is if it can happen or not, and how if so. We already know that MPAA is willing to basically do whatever, even contribute themselves to piracy, if it means they can put people in jail for copying stuff eventually. They themselves also gotten in trouble for copyright violations themselves in the past, so doesn't seem like they're hiding away from breaking a little bit of laws to hunt pirates.
> the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
I really hope not. My understanding is that to be "effective" it needs to at least be a form of encryption with a secret key. At least, I'm not aware of any case law that allowed anything less than that.
IMO, "dummy notes" are nothing more than a form of obfuscation. If it's obvious how to filter them out, then I don't think it comes close to meeting the bare minimum of what might count as an "effective technical measure".
Of course, who knows what way the courts will rule if it ever reached that far.
shitty CAPTCHA’s and simple checksums have been ruled to be “effective measures”, so this would probably be too.
However, Section 1201(f) is designed to allow developers leeway in reverse engineering to make "independently created computer programs" talk to other "computer programs". But this usually distinguishes between talking to a binary (good) and reading a media file (bad).
My guess is the encoder is probably legal under 1201(f) because it’s reverse engineering a DMCA covered application to create new media files for it to use. But the decoder would be illegal because it reverse engineers a DMCA covered application to extract copyrighted media.
No, on appeal the simple checksum was ruled to NOT be an effective measure. [0]
And while courts might have ruled that a CAPTCHA might count as a "technological measure" they haven't gotten as far as ruling them as "effective" yet.
But in general yes. The protection scheme doesn't need to be well designed or free of design flaws to count as "effective". But from what I can tell, it does need to be a valid attempt at some cryptographic scheme requiring a secret known only to the copyright holder.
Any company would be a fool not to send a C&D given how many people on this site seem to think that "I got a C&D" means "if I don't obey it, I'm gonna get sued."
Anti-SLAPP laws exist for a reason, and if corps can bully anyone, how is it that corps routinely lose lawsuits on either side of the docket, hmmmm?
Keep licking that corporate boot, folks. Corps send C&Ds because they cost them all of maybe $100-200 and they're so effective.
There is a long road between "got a C&D" and "am getting sued." Among other things, a judge is going to want to see that both sides attempted to negotiate. If the company sending the C&D just demands that and then tries to file suit, the judge is going to tell them to go back to step 2 and stop bothering him/her.
Folks, stop telling people that if they get a C&D they have to just fold. Good chance you never hear from them again because the cost of suing you is nowhere near the damages they will be able to prove in court.
> the cost of suing you is nowhere near the damages they will be able to prove in court.
The problem is, the one advising them whether to sue or not might not care about that at all, and might personally profit from a lawsuit. So they've got all incentive in the world to persuade their employer that they must pursue this or they will have given up priceless rights forever.
You spent --- what I'd assume would be several k$ from prices found online --- to buy a self-playing piano, and are now asking if you can release the tools to have it play the music of your choosing? IMHO the fact that you even had to think about asking if you could do this is everything that's wrong with society today. IANAL but as long as you aren't releasing something that's copyrighted from the original code, or violating some patent, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
> "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
OP is essentially asking if it's legal or not, not if people will dislike it. Navigating your nations laws with the mindset of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is bound to land you in places people generally prefer to stay out of.
I agree it sucks that some things seem arbitrary restricted, especially when it's victim-less (/ the victim is a faceless for-profit corporation), but kind of feels non-ideal to recommend people to "ask for forgiveness" when it comes to potentially breaking laws.
> 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).
Standard answer fit to keep the parasites fed. There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.
Just release the code somewhere, anonymously, it isn't yours anyway.
> There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.
The thing is, at least in Germany, lawyers are required to carry a liability insurance and in the case th advice ends up being really bad you can hold their insurance accountable.
On the other hand, this is Hacker news, so my first inclination of a response was going to be something like this:
"Get some small amount of bitcoin and pay a VPS hosting provider in Moldova for a year's service on a $15-per-month equivalent KVM VM and put what you know on there anonymously as static content, then publish the link here."
Not that a sufficiently dedicated nation state federal crime agency or intelligence apparatus probably couldn't trace back to you, but it raises the bar for something like random civil lawsuits from piano companies.
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.
> And in some jurisdictions (notably the US) anybody can sue anyone for anything.
That should be the case in all jurisdictions. The justice system exists so that, if I feel treated unfairly, I can go to the state to settle the question whether/how much that is true. If there are issues where I cannot go to court, what am I supposed to do? Go fight you over the issue?
What differs (a lot) is how effectively the system rejects frivolous/unjust cases, how much time/money it costs you to defend yourself against remaining claims, and what systems there are to prevent people from going to court (having affordable care will prevent people from taking some medical claims to court; obligatory car insurance means most fender bender cases get handled by insurance companies, etc(
They might object to the existence of the software and demand “its destruction.”
Or sue your ass…or file a DCMA takedown with Github.
Or all of the above.
The best likely outcome is probably “no.”
Because they have lawyers and that’s what lawyers do.
If you really really want to share the information, you might write a blog post with technical details without linking to any code. Sharing the blog to the “Facebook group” will let you assess community and corporate interest and make an informed decision.
Keep in mind that they could say yes and still do all that bad stuff anyway.
> I might just email the company. If they object, I won't make my GitHub repo public.
If you do this, I can nearly guarantee they will either never respond as a best case scenario, or they will object.
There is effectively zero chance a company would give you any indication that you have their blessing. Even if they don't actually care one way or another they will make the assumption that giving you any kind of positive response is nothing but a negative for themselves in terms of future liability, etc
The phrase that it is "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists because of situations like the one you're in.
Just publish the repo. Don't contact them. If they C&D you, take it down if you don't want to deal with the legal repercussions.
For all the same reasons that it is easy to predict how they will react if you ask, it is easy to predict how they will react if you don't and they find the repo and object. They will send you a cease and desist letter telling you to take the repo down. You will then take the repo down and face no other legal action because it will not be worth their time to make any bigger deal of it than that.
HN users are at the same time the brightest and the most clueless. Why on earth do you think they will agree to something that they will perceive as damaging to them in the present or in a possible future?
Ideally someone random on github would post the same thing, so you don't have to. That would be a fortunate coincidence but I'm pretty sure these things happen.
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.
in most regions it is not illegal but asking so here would require readers to know exactly what laws apply where you are to answer that adequately from a legal perspective.
i can say, many people do it, some get in trouble because of local laws, others dont because their regions dont have such laws.
if you look at exploitdb and such site they have many exploits also for proprietary things. i would say if you dont outright leak firmware or such IP, an exploit itself is usually not strictly illegal.
its always best to contact a vendor if they are contactable, to both help them fix it and get permission for a post..that way, you can be relatively comfortable you are safe. get it in writing, email is ok.
edit: this is a gray are where the decoder might be considered leaking an algorithm btw. its perhaps not strictly an exploit but some characteristics will be shared around how its perceived to use something not as its intended.
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.
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.)
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.
> The PianoDisc versions are mp3s encoded with the right channel carrying MIDI to be played on the piano, and the left channel containing any accompanying music to be played through attached speakers (who doesn't want the harmonica on Piano Man?)
What a cursed format!
I don't understand what the designers were thinking of... 2000 Hz square wave on right channel? Seriously? Nobody would hear something suspicious and nobody would literally see it on spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's holdover from analog days and it was on casette tape before.
IANAL but... isn't this somewhat analogous to side-loading apps on iOS or Android? As in, Google/Apple make it awkward for you to provide your own files to run on your phone, but ultimately it's not impossible nor illegal.
Likewise, if you're able to upload your own custom MIDI (or other) files for your piano to play, then all you'd be doing is sharing a utility that creates mixed audio/MIDI MP3s, which may or may not be used to create files which can then be legitimately uploaded to a piano.
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!
Soon enough you will realise that everything is a derivative work, and the sooner that happens to everyone, the faster the delusion of Imaginary Property will disappear and lead to actual competition and progress.
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/)
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?
From my understanding of laws in Germany, in Germany, you're allowed to do all of this if your goal is interoperability of systems.
If your goal is to not pay them money - which you strategically unwisely hinted at with this question - then that's not covered by that exemption, I think.
So from my understanding, adding new music and releasing the tooling for that should be fine, but IANAL.
Frankly, what is or isn't legal doesn't matter as much as your story, as you will be judged by that. It also helps if the story is actually genuine, but that is a somewhat optional requirement all things considered. At least the industry treats it as such.
__
FWIW, as these capabilities trickle down to everyone through LLMs, it is worth asking yourself whether it is worth the trouble of releasing it in the first place.
If anyone can replicate this within a reasonably short timespan, then maybe not.
___
With this stuff in particular, it's also worth considering the business model of the entity.
Does your work pose a relevant risk for their bottom line? If yes, then bad. If no, then shrug.
Is music sold their main revenue channel, or are they just also doing that because recurring revenue is nice to have?
How user-friendly would you want your work to end up as? Would it target the demographic that would otherwise just buy the music?
Truth is that this is all just an elaborate dance.
___
To close the "polish trains" gap in what I just wrote in the last section:
"Is their business model ethical? And is it considered that by the majority, common sense, and politicians?"
And because software vendors never provide a Linux version of their stuff, you kinda have to do it anyways, because you end up with a hardware piece you can’t use without.
Besides the fact that this sort of protection through obfuscation is dead now anyway. If you can ask an LLM to do it so can I, or anybody else. The only downside is duplication of work/wasted tokens but eh.
AI has already started commoditising software. Hopefully we see more OS' lean into the "safe" layer that runs everything and then temporary/custom interfaces dynamically created by AI on top.
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?
> (k) to interfere with or circumvent the security features of the Service
IANAL. But I think reverse engineering their data structure, identifying a security measure - even one as weak as obfuscation, and publishing code to circumvent it is clearly against your license.
I am also NAL, but out of curiosity does OPs post detailing the obfuscation transgress any laws?
If the security measures exist in plain sight, as they apparently do, are they allowed to be discussed?
I reckon that if OP posts the encoder/decoder software that'd be against some sort of license clause. However in the age of AI who cares about the software at this point? Anyone can prompt their own private version into existence.
Just thinking out loud here. I have not considered AIs use as personal "cheat engines".
I wouldn't take claude research at face value. It found something odd, came up with a plausible sounding explanation and confidently presented it to OP. Doesn't mean it is true.
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.
Would love for sources / prior case law around this? I'm Australian and involved in reverse engineering insulin pumps and CGMs, and we are constantly worried about getting our butts DMCA'd.
Don't get me wrong, they absolutely can DMCA you if the hosting is in a foreign country iirc.
I was under the impression thr prescedant was:
Data Access Corporation v Powerflex Services Pty Ltd (1999), alongside specific provisions in the Copyright Act 1968.
The australian DMCA is called the TPM, it's more aimed at Bypassing, decrypt, or circumvent a digital lock or DRM (Digital Rights Management) protecting copyrighted material.
I do not think that phantom notes are encryption or rights management.
If you do your hosting in australia for your code/software, the US companies will probably have a bad time trying to convince the australian courts that access is the same as copyright infringement.
I'm not a lawyer, but i'll be damned if the 'vibe of it' shouldn't be a legal defense.
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.
You could train an LLM on a dataset that intentionally excludes certain data, and see if it is able to extrapolate outside of its dataset and come up with those excluded items independently.
For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.
Thanks for the elaboration. (Though I'm not sure
dmarinus would agree with your criterion?)
> For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.
Would you accept this weaker version: make up a new programming language (that's guaranteed not to be in the training set), and see if the model (which has trained on programming in existing languages) can cope?
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.
> If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act.
That's not how the DMA works at all, there is no concept of gatekeeping practices. Instead, the EU Commission designates companies that act as gatekeeper for some services (current list here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers-portal_...) which then puts constraints on what they do.
Don't publish your code. Let the AI "accidentally escape the sandbox and publish it in a readily available Git repository". Tongue in cheek, in current days who would blame a poor LLM just trying to do the right thing? :)
> Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.
If there are doubts about C&D letters, don't publish code to a USA provider. Bring it to Gitee, under an anonymous author name.
Exactly. Surprised to see 'just don't let them find you' so far down when it should be the first advice.
If you don't want to be responsible for it, another way is to just publish it anonymously: make a GitHub that isn't attached to your real name etc, perhaps using a one-off disposable email address, and put it there. Then you don't have to think about what the lawyers think. Worst case it'll get taken down, but by that point it'll likely be popular enough that there'll be plenty of copies.
[Pirate flag emoji here]
> Worst case it'll get taken down,
Eeh, worst case scenario you'll get sued as Microsoft will have no problem with handing over everything they have from your Windows installation information, GitHub accounts, NPM authentication and everything else they own today if the courts tell them to.
You can't just commit crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not, and expect that to not come back to haunt you eventually. Kind of poor form to suggest otherwise too.
"You can't just commit crimes on the open internet "
Who said it is a crime, are you a lawyer?
Allegedly commit potential crimes*
I'm not saying yay/nay if this is a crime or not, but if you think it might be, and you create a new account on GitHub to "be anonymous", you're not taking opsec seriously enough for something you believe might be a crime.
By the way, generally judges or juries would be the ones to decide if something was illegal or not, it's not the lawyers who decide this, in any country I'm familiar with.
Tbf "is it a crime" is hard for even a single lawyer to answer because it depends on: who you are, your skin colour, how rich you are, your sex, whether it's a white collar crime or not, did you commit the crime on behalf of a corpo, etc.
But we like to pretend that the justice system delivers justice evenhandedly I suppose.
No it does not. The law defines what a crime is. That you are bummed out about how it is applied, does not change the question, whether it is a crime. One thing is the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor, another thing is the application and the punishment meted out.
That's not quite the case in common law countries. In countries like the UK and the US, the interpretation of the law as written is ultimately decided by the court, meaning that the definition of what constitutes a crime/felony/misdemeanor is subjective. The more courts that attempt to interpret that specific law, the more 'jurisprudence' builds up, meaning that the interpretation applied in a previous decision can certainly have an impact on a future decision.
Sure, on github it will (still) get the most attention, but perhaps another repository outside the US is a better fit.
You could also create a text document instead of a software that details the mechanism used to fool other MIDI decoders and publish only that (for now).
Finally, familiarize yourself with the Art. 6 Software Directive (2009/24/EC) / §69e UrhG — decompilation for interoperability. It may be your ticket for a legal status in Germany/EU.
What if the companies start auto subpoenaing the AI companies to try and tie the code to an account?
Let them do it. It will end up really well. I know the system has been protecting these companies, but that has been an economic concern as much as other motives. Now that AI is the crown jewel of economy and global dominance, let the entertainment industry have a go at it. Let them.
Do companies in the US really have the right to do that? I would think that kind of investigation is reserved for law enforcement only. If the design was made over email, would the piano company be able to subpoena Google for someone's private gmail messages?
> Do companies in the US really have the right to do that?
Does it matter? What's important is if it can happen or not, and how if so. We already know that MPAA is willing to basically do whatever, even contribute themselves to piracy, if it means they can put people in jail for copying stuff eventually. They themselves also gotten in trouble for copyright violations themselves in the past, so doesn't seem like they're hiding away from breaking a little bit of laws to hunt pirates.
Attorneys can subpoena if the court approves, as part of ongoing litigation, AFAIU (IANAL).
Consider previous cases where companies like Reddit have unmasked their users at the behest of court order.
Maybe then using an open weights model is a good way to hide your tracks...
Or at least use an obscurer model from an obscure company, so they don't know who to subpoena.
Everyone is aware that multiple services offer zero data retention, right?
> the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".
I really hope not. My understanding is that to be "effective" it needs to at least be a form of encryption with a secret key. At least, I'm not aware of any case law that allowed anything less than that.
IMO, "dummy notes" are nothing more than a form of obfuscation. If it's obvious how to filter them out, then I don't think it comes close to meeting the bare minimum of what might count as an "effective technical measure".
Of course, who knows what way the courts will rule if it ever reached that far.
shitty CAPTCHA’s and simple checksums have been ruled to be “effective measures”, so this would probably be too.
However, Section 1201(f) is designed to allow developers leeway in reverse engineering to make "independently created computer programs" talk to other "computer programs". But this usually distinguishes between talking to a binary (good) and reading a media file (bad).
My guess is the encoder is probably legal under 1201(f) because it’s reverse engineering a DMCA covered application to create new media files for it to use. But the decoder would be illegal because it reverse engineers a DMCA covered application to extract copyrighted media.
No, on appeal the simple checksum was ruled to NOT be an effective measure. [0]
And while courts might have ruled that a CAPTCHA might count as a "technological measure" they haven't gotten as far as ruling them as "effective" yet.
But in general yes. The protection scheme doesn't need to be well designed or free of design flaws to count as "effective". But from what I can tell, it does need to be a valid attempt at some cryptographic scheme requiring a secret known only to the copyright holder.
[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/387...
Consider publishing the prompts used to create it.
Very little value in the prompts imho, anyone can point their LLM to that post and it’s enough
Instruct the AI to output an .MD file that can be used to reconstruct the code
Any company would be a fool not to send a C&D given how many people on this site seem to think that "I got a C&D" means "if I don't obey it, I'm gonna get sued."
Anti-SLAPP laws exist for a reason, and if corps can bully anyone, how is it that corps routinely lose lawsuits on either side of the docket, hmmmm?
Keep licking that corporate boot, folks. Corps send C&Ds because they cost them all of maybe $100-200 and they're so effective.
There is a long road between "got a C&D" and "am getting sued." Among other things, a judge is going to want to see that both sides attempted to negotiate. If the company sending the C&D just demands that and then tries to file suit, the judge is going to tell them to go back to step 2 and stop bothering him/her.
Folks, stop telling people that if they get a C&D they have to just fold. Good chance you never hear from them again because the cost of suing you is nowhere near the damages they will be able to prove in court.
> the cost of suing you is nowhere near the damages they will be able to prove in court.
The problem is, the one advising them whether to sue or not might not care about that at all, and might personally profit from a lawsuit. So they've got all incentive in the world to persuade their employer that they must pursue this or they will have given up priceless rights forever.
The average mortal cannot afford negative backlash, financially or otherwise, to their living situation.
> There is a long road between "got a C&D" and "am getting sued."
Sometimes!
You spent --- what I'd assume would be several k$ from prices found online --- to buy a self-playing piano, and are now asking if you can release the tools to have it play the music of your choosing? IMHO the fact that you even had to think about asking if you could do this is everything that's wrong with society today. IANAL but as long as you aren't releasing something that's copyrighted from the original code, or violating some patent, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.
"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
> "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)
OP is essentially asking if it's legal or not, not if people will dislike it. Navigating your nations laws with the mindset of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission" is bound to land you in places people generally prefer to stay out of.
I agree it sucks that some things seem arbitrary restricted, especially when it's victim-less (/ the victim is a faceless for-profit corporation), but kind of feels non-ideal to recommend people to "ask for forgiveness" when it comes to potentially breaking laws.
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).
Don’t ask Hacker News for legal advice. If you really want to know the answer, ask a lawyer.
Standard answer fit to keep the parasites fed. There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.
Just release the code somewhere, anonymously, it isn't yours anyway.
> There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.
The thing is, at least in Germany, lawyers are required to carry a liability insurance and in the case th advice ends up being really bad you can hold their insurance accountable.
On the other hand, this is Hacker news, so my first inclination of a response was going to be something like this:
"Get some small amount of bitcoin and pay a VPS hosting provider in Moldova for a year's service on a $15-per-month equivalent KVM VM and put what you know on there anonymously as static content, then publish the link here."
Not that a sufficiently dedicated nation state federal crime agency or intelligence apparatus probably couldn't trace back to you, but it raises the bar for something like random civil lawsuits from piano companies.
> makes a hacker news post from an 11 year old account
> jumps through a lot of inconvenient hoops to "anonymously" publish code
Something doesn't add up there.
This whole writeup is basically the verbatim prompt recipe for anyone to just whip it up themselves.
Blocking the final result is no longer a real block, when all it requires is a vague prompt to replicate it.
We've entered a strange territory.
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.
> And in some jurisdictions (notably the US) anybody can sue anyone for anything.
That should be the case in all jurisdictions. The justice system exists so that, if I feel treated unfairly, I can go to the state to settle the question whether/how much that is true. If there are issues where I cannot go to court, what am I supposed to do? Go fight you over the issue?
What differs (a lot) is how effectively the system rejects frivolous/unjust cases, how much time/money it costs you to defend yourself against remaining claims, and what systems there are to prevent people from going to court (having affordable care will prevent people from taking some medical claims to court; obligatory car insurance means most fender bender cases get handled by insurance companies, etc(
Should also mention the SLAPP suits which specifically exists because anyone can sue for anything.
I might just email the company. If they object, I won't make my GitHub repo public.
This seems like the worst possible advice. It will only bring negative attention and maybe legal repercussions.
They might object to the existence of the software and demand “its destruction.”
Or sue your ass…or file a DCMA takedown with Github.
Or all of the above.
The best likely outcome is probably “no.”
Because they have lawyers and that’s what lawyers do.
If you really really want to share the information, you might write a blog post with technical details without linking to any code. Sharing the blog to the “Facebook group” will let you assess community and corporate interest and make an informed decision.
Keep in mind that they could say yes and still do all that bad stuff anyway.
> I might just email the company. If they object, I won't make my GitHub repo public.
If you do this, I can nearly guarantee they will either never respond as a best case scenario, or they will object.
There is effectively zero chance a company would give you any indication that you have their blessing. Even if they don't actually care one way or another they will make the assumption that giving you any kind of positive response is nothing but a negative for themselves in terms of future liability, etc
The phrase that it is "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists because of situations like the one you're in.
Just publish the repo. Don't contact them. If they C&D you, take it down if you don't want to deal with the legal repercussions.
For all the same reasons that it is easy to predict how they will react if you ask, it is easy to predict how they will react if you don't and they find the repo and object. They will send you a cease and desist letter telling you to take the repo down. You will then take the repo down and face no other legal action because it will not be worth their time to make any bigger deal of it than that.
Have you ever worked corporate before?
It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.
HN users are at the same time the brightest and the most clueless. Why on earth do you think they will agree to something that they will perceive as damaging to them in the present or in a possible future?
Ideally someone random on github would post the same thing, so you don't have to. That would be a fortunate coincidence but I'm pretty sure these things happen.
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.
I imagine it hexdumps it and looks for patterns.
Heh, why not ask Fable? I'm sure its legal advice is based on more informedness than when asking HN.
in most regions it is not illegal but asking so here would require readers to know exactly what laws apply where you are to answer that adequately from a legal perspective.
i can say, many people do it, some get in trouble because of local laws, others dont because their regions dont have such laws.
if you look at exploitdb and such site they have many exploits also for proprietary things. i would say if you dont outright leak firmware or such IP, an exploit itself is usually not strictly illegal.
its always best to contact a vendor if they are contactable, to both help them fix it and get permission for a post..that way, you can be relatively comfortable you are safe. get it in writing, email is ok.
edit: this is a gray are where the decoder might be considered leaking an algorithm btw. its perhaps not strictly an exploit but some characteristics will be shared around how its perceived to use something not as its intended.
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.
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.)
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.
I do think that “decoy notes” is the kind of potential hallucination that warrants manual investigation.
> The PianoDisc versions are mp3s encoded with the right channel carrying MIDI to be played on the piano, and the left channel containing any accompanying music to be played through attached speakers (who doesn't want the harmonica on Piano Man?)
What a cursed format!
I don't understand what the designers were thinking of... 2000 Hz square wave on right channel? Seriously? Nobody would hear something suspicious and nobody would literally see it on spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's holdover from analog days and it was on casette tape before.
Also somebody reverse engineered it before - https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/
So Fable probably just igested it from documentation of this software or some very obscure forum thread somewhere.
IANAL but... isn't this somewhat analogous to side-loading apps on iOS or Android? As in, Google/Apple make it awkward for you to provide your own files to run on your phone, but ultimately it's not impossible nor illegal.
Likewise, if you're able to upload your own custom MIDI (or other) files for your piano to play, then all you'd be doing is sharing a utility that creates mixed audio/MIDI MP3s, which may or may not be used to create files which can then be legitimately uploaded to a piano.
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!
Soon enough you will realise that everything is a derivative work, and the sooner that happens to everyone, the faster the delusion of Imaginary Property will disappear and lead to actual competition and progress.
This is a nit but his name is actually Erik Satie not Eric Satre.
Thanks! I was confused, thinking "Is it Satie, or is this a case of Muphry's law?". I wanted to learn more about this Satre composer I never heard of.
It's a nit. They made a typo.
typo: did you mean Erik Satie?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie
> some music from Eric Satre, a 19th century French composer
> Gymnopedie No 1
Eric (or as he preferred, Erik) SATIE.
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/)
Why not publish the methodology in detail and leave it at that?
Usually people only bother reading it if the outcome is interesting
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?
From my understanding of laws in Germany, in Germany, you're allowed to do all of this if your goal is interoperability of systems.
If your goal is to not pay them money - which you strategically unwisely hinted at with this question - then that's not covered by that exemption, I think.
So from my understanding, adding new music and releasing the tooling for that should be fine, but IANAL.
Frankly, what is or isn't legal doesn't matter as much as your story, as you will be judged by that. It also helps if the story is actually genuine, but that is a somewhat optional requirement all things considered. At least the industry treats it as such.
__
FWIW, as these capabilities trickle down to everyone through LLMs, it is worth asking yourself whether it is worth the trouble of releasing it in the first place.
If anyone can replicate this within a reasonably short timespan, then maybe not.
___
With this stuff in particular, it's also worth considering the business model of the entity.
Does your work pose a relevant risk for their bottom line? If yes, then bad. If no, then shrug.
Is music sold their main revenue channel, or are they just also doing that because recurring revenue is nice to have?
How user-friendly would you want your work to end up as? Would it target the demographic that would otherwise just buy the music?
Truth is that this is all just an elaborate dance.
___
To close the "polish trains" gap in what I just wrote in the last section:
"Is their business model ethical? And is it considered that by the majority, common sense, and politicians?"
That’s the way.
And because software vendors never provide a Linux version of their stuff, you kinda have to do it anyways, because you end up with a hardware piece you can’t use without.
IANAL, especially not an American one.
But if you're worried just pop it on anon GH.
Besides the fact that this sort of protection through obfuscation is dead now anyway. If you can ask an LLM to do it so can I, or anybody else. The only downside is duplication of work/wasted tokens but eh.
AI has already started commoditising software. Hopefully we see more OS' lean into the "safe" layer that runs everything and then temporary/custom interfaces dynamically created by AI on top.
Personally I’d just do it
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?
US.
https://store.pianodisc.com/pages/terms-of-service-and-condi...
I don't see details about them mentioning and decoder or encoder.
> (k) to interfere with or circumvent the security features of the Service
IANAL. But I think reverse engineering their data structure, identifying a security measure - even one as weak as obfuscation, and publishing code to circumvent it is clearly against your license.
I am also NAL, but out of curiosity does OPs post detailing the obfuscation transgress any laws?
If the security measures exist in plain sight, as they apparently do, are they allowed to be discussed?
I reckon that if OP posts the encoder/decoder software that'd be against some sort of license clause. However in the age of AI who cares about the software at this point? Anyone can prompt their own private version into existence.
Just thinking out loud here. I have not considered AIs use as personal "cheat engines".
I think that is the terms and conditions of the web site, not the hardware product.
You can always publish the prompts.
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?
You bought a hardware device and you own that device?
This decoy notes scheme seems pretty unethical.
I wouldn't take claude research at face value. It found something odd, came up with a plausible sounding explanation and confidently presented it to OP. Doesn't mean it is true.
Have fable "accidentally" escape containment and publish it.
Maybe send this question to the Anthropic legal team. I'd be curious if you get an answer and what it'll be.
Find someone in Europe or Australia, or some other place with non-insane digital laws, and have that person publish it as the “developer.”
Might as well publish anonymously in that case..
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.
You should just ask AI, since you used AI to make the encoder and write your HN post.
Another option that works quite well is called FAFO. So, I'd say just publish it, and we'll see. Keep us posted!
Erik Satie
yea - just publish it
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.
Would love for sources / prior case law around this? I'm Australian and involved in reverse engineering insulin pumps and CGMs, and we are constantly worried about getting our butts DMCA'd.
Don't get me wrong, they absolutely can DMCA you if the hosting is in a foreign country iirc.
I was under the impression thr prescedant was:
Data Access Corporation v Powerflex Services Pty Ltd (1999), alongside specific provisions in the Copyright Act 1968.
The australian DMCA is called the TPM, it's more aimed at Bypassing, decrypt, or circumvent a digital lock or DRM (Digital Rights Management) protecting copyrighted material.
I do not think that phantom notes are encryption or rights management.
If you do your hosting in australia for your code/software, the US companies will probably have a bad time trying to convince the australian courts that access is the same as copyright infringement.
I'm not a lawyer, but i'll be damned if the 'vibe of it' shouldn't be a legal defense.
I'm your lawyer, you should do it
why are you on hn, you are billing in 6 minute increments!
Should've asked Fable.
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.
Sounds like your experience from LLMs dates back to 2022.
How do you know this? How would you falsify this hypothesis?
You could train an LLM on a dataset that intentionally excludes certain data, and see if it is able to extrapolate outside of its dataset and come up with those excluded items independently.
For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.
Thanks for the elaboration. (Though I'm not sure dmarinus would agree with your criterion?)
> For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.
Would you accept this weaker version: make up a new programming language (that's guaranteed not to be in the training set), and see if the model (which has trained on programming in existing languages) can cope?