In their battle against copyright infringement lawsuits, Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin copyrighted every possible MIDI melody, then released them to the public.

Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin, two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody available, copyrighted the whole thing and released it all to the public. The purpose of this substantial task is to prevent musicians from getting sued.

For the most part, in copyright cases involving melodies, the deciding factor is access to the music. If an artist being sued could have listened just once to the melody which they are accused of stealing, they could then be found to have subconsciously infringed original content. With increasing accessibility to music and art, it’s becoming significantly more difficult to defend against such accusations.