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.

"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)

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).

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.

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.

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.

- Get an apk online, you haven't accepted a EULA.

- Run jadx to get some code to work with

- Ask Claude to extract the protocol specification cleanly for a Bluetooth device with capabilities etc.

- Use Claude to implement a version as a TUI/CLI in go, rust, whatever.

I get to use a device I own with a local Bluetooth connection from my machine, maybe Home Assistant. I do not contact any online services (there are none anyway in that case).

Since it's to avoid getting locked in with proprietary OS, it's a clean room reversing through a spec and an LLM produced a non copyrightable output... Can I just release this however I want? Probably a basic MIT or CC0, whatever...

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!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie

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?

This decoy notes scheme seems pretty unethical.

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.

I gave the mp3 to Fable, which promptly decoded the format, identifying the right channel carrying MIDI using a 2004.5 Hz square wave.

Wow. Abuse of format like this is always funny to see.

On a serious note: reverse engineering is legal in australia, even for DMCA violations.

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?"

Even if it were illegal, you could have done it by releasing anonymously (on edit, and reworking the code to remove Fable's fingerprints)... if you hadn't first blown it by publicly posted a traceable question.

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.

some music from Eric Satre, a 19th century French composer

Gymnopedie No 1

Eric (or as he preferred, Erik) SATIE.

Seems more like a PSA on how to do it yourself with plausible deniability.

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.

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.

identifying the right channel carrying MIDI using a 2004.5 Hz square wave.

What? MIDI and MP3 are opposite formats, they are designed for orthogonal runtime readouts. MIDI is a protocol that contains a variety of meta events and note events. I suppose you could use PCM to represent MIDI, but if you have the entire audio spectrum available [in an MP3 file], there's then the very strange choice to constrict yourself to exactly one non-integer frequency value.

Or, your Fable hallucinated an interpretation and you went along with it.

Also, the composer you are referencing is not Eric Satre, it is Eric Satie, composer of the 3 famous Gymnopedie pieces for solo piano.

That's where Bypass Paywalls Free Firefox plugin lives.

Its also where a whole lot of DRM bypass tools for Netflix etm also live.

I won't enumerate those details here.

The AI provider may also have account, payment, IP and conversation records connecting the generated code to you. An unrelated GitHub account and disposable email would therefore provide only superficial pseudonymity, not meaningful anonymity.

If attribution would create a material legal risk, I would assume the project is already attributable. A civil plaintiff could potentially seek records through discovery, and law enforcement could use the appropriate legal process. Getting actual legal advice before publishing seems safer than trying to anonymize it after posting this thread.