Intellectual property lawyer Damien Riehl and computer programmer Noah Rubin were talking in a hotel bar when they came up with an idea: what if you could use a computer to create every possible musical melody, in the same way that hackers might use “brute force” to run through every possible combination of a secure password?
That night, they built a prototype program that created 3,000 melodies. And so began the “All the Music” project — the melodies soon grew to 68bn and, as of today, 417bn. Copyright for the melodies is waived and they are released for public use, which prevents songwriters from accidentally infringing rights on existing music, helping them avoid frivolous or opportunistic lawsuits.
Then, Riehl and his collaborators saw that this model could also be applied to patents, and have started work on a successor project called All the Patents.