nottrobin

Which activities did you have in mind?

How so?

I don't agree. The size of the set is of paramount importance to that point. They can always bring the mean down by just adding more recordings to the set, to further obscure how popular the most popular recordings are. In a set of 10 billion, of course people aren't listening to most of them.

Quite clearly what the plaintiffs are afraid of is that there are a few very popular works in there that they could be making real money from. There's no way to know this from the mean alone.

Do you mention the distinction between creation and discovery because it's a distinction in law? Cos it seems intuitively obvious to me that distinguishing between creation and discovery has no philosophical merit - creativity happens within many finite domains, the size of the problem domain really has little relevance to something's artistic value.

The exhausting of useful chords as you describe has both already happened and will never happen. There are countless songs already based on the most common chord progressions, but new ones will also continue to be found for the foreseeable future. We're nowhere near knowing the size of this domain.

I am completely on the IA's side here, and I hope they win the case. Down with copyright.

However, "on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one researcher per month" seems to me like a dishonest way to present the data. Surely surely there are one or a few recordings in the project that are vastly more popular than others. That's always how it goes. So "on average" completely obscures how popular the most popular ones might be.