Something that doesn't seem to have been discussed from the legal angle is this: if one can make any copyright claim about these datasets qualifying as "prior art", doesn't that then open itself up for trolls to claim that the datasets infringe on existing prior art? It's not like I can draw a pikachu, release it to public domain and make a slam dunk legal claim that all other pikachus are henceforth kosher.
I think Adam Neely makes a more relevant point in his videos about Dark Horse and Levitating: it doesn't really matter what any actual infringement claim is because you can typically find relevant prior art from legitimate works of music if you dig deep enough, even without going through the exercise of autogenerating note sequences.
As I understand, the legal arguments focus on whether there is a clear and traceable connection between the creative process for a song and the alleged infringed work, and whether there is clear intent to omit credit where it is due. I.e. the argument already starts from the assumption that similarities and inspirations from existing works of art can and do exist.
Is there still a value in this as a Reductio ad absurdum? A short cut that makes it less neccessary to slog through a prior art battle in each and every case?
IMHO, the similarity angle is nearly a red herring. "Girl from Rio" by Anitta is unequivocally a copy of "Girl from Ipanema" but it has proper attribution so there's no problem. What really matters is this chain of attribution: For Levitating, did Dua Lipa collaborate w/ Artikal Sound System or otherwise appropriate artistic output from them in a more significant capacity than any other permutation of song pairs from the other dozen similar songs? And if so, was Artikal Sound System cheated out of income? I'd argue that no, and that they probably are getting more publicity from the whole stunt than they otherwise would have.
There's a bazillion examples of flat out copying being considered perfectly fine: the lyrics for Anne Marie's "2002" clearly uses iconic lyrics from Britney Spears pretty much verbatim, and in a way that is obviously intended to refer to Britney, but the thing is that many many other artists before her have done similar homages (e.g. Calvin Harris' "My Way" references Sinatra's, etc) so there's a fairly strong reason to believe that a lawsuit based solely on similarity grounds would go nowhere.
I think Adam Neely makes a more relevant point in his videos about Dark Horse and Levitating: it doesn't really matter what any actual infringement claim is because you can typically find relevant prior art from legitimate works of music if you dig deep enough, even without going through the exercise of autogenerating note sequences.
As I understand, the legal arguments focus on whether there is a clear and traceable connection between the creative process for a song and the alleged infringed work, and whether there is clear intent to omit credit where it is due. I.e. the argument already starts from the assumption that similarities and inspirations from existing works of art can and do exist.