Slashdot Mirror
Copyright Claimed on Telephone Tones
awful writes: "Two composers in Australia have copyrighted over 100,000,000,000 phone tone dialing sequences. They state in the article that they are lampooning copyright laws that protect big business rather than artists. Their website has more info and explains how they did it. You can check your number and make sure it hasn't been copyrighted by these guys. They have already recieved one offer of money - from a guy who wanted to purchase the copyright to his number so he could stop direct marketing firms from calling him." Somehow I don't think the inventors of DTMF envisioned this. Update: 10/04 14:11 GMT by M : There's a US mirror available.
These guys are brilliant. But what about the timing, or spacing between the "notes"? If I dial in a different rhythm is it the same?
What, me worry?
Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers. Does that number look familiar? If the story is correct, they have tried to copyright every single possible 11 digit phone number
IMHO, if they have the cash to buy some good lawyers, they'll probably be able to pull this off. What's sad is that big companies have gotten away with worse. (In fact, someone owns the patent on the Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich!) Maybe this will knock some sense into big companies copyrighting and patenting the lamest things (Hey, there's a patent on using a laser pointer to excersize cats too!)
-Patrick
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Ok.. um.. but what about actual songs. Would we have duling copyrights? I'm sure you can play dulling tones while you are at it.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
ok, little note for some prior posters:
copyright and patent are two completely different things, with two different purposes. prior art doesn't apply to copyright. ok...now that i've gotten that out of the way...
i'm not sure if i agree with what these gentlemen have done. i don't believe that such things deserve to be 'owned' by anyone. no matter the reasoning behind their actions, and even if they are attempting to protect people from corporations and 'BIG BROTHER' i find myself disagreeing with their methods. also, i fear the day that they are threatened and bought out by a [insert entity here]that doesn't have their moral fabric. in such a case, beware.
what about sampling?
could I sample portions of seven notes of a "melody"?
IANAL (and I know the whole point was to be funny anyway).
I kind of doubt this is what the idea of copy righting was for. Copyrights along with patents were originally made to promote scientific research. Protecting one's intellectual property is the whole idea behind copy righting.
Some schmuck who starts to copy right tone sequences is totally not getting the point. He's not promoting scientific research, or protecting his intellectual property. He's just trying to make a quick $, through a loophole in the laws.
Its as if suddendly the sequence of phone digits has been invented by this guy and he has to have the copy right to your tone. This whole thing is as rediculous as the guy who claimed to own all the land outside of the solar system, and thinks he's somehow going to get away with that. If your armies/people are using/conquered something, its theirs, and no one elses.
- Nuts and Gum, together at last.
You started in the right direction by pointing out that copyright and patent law were not the same.
However, you failed to complete your analysis. Of course, having a copyright on those tones doesn't prevent any normal usage of DTMF. Why that is, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The thing is, there are limits to copyright. The shorter a work, the harder to defend its copyright in court. For instance, it is impossible to copyright a word, phrase, note, or chord. Short poems, like haiku, push the lower bounds, and have quite weak protection: only a very blatant direct copy might infringe on them.
Obviously, these are not legal (or at least not legally relevant) copyrights, and couldn't be enforced.
I know it's all in fun, but I think it would be more satisfying to mock the system using things that would stand up in court.
Actually, it was a real problem according to VH1's "One Hit Wonders" show. Not only did the real Jenny get bombarded with calls (yes there was a real Jenny who gave her number to one of the band, and it was 867-5309), but everyone else in every area code as well.
This absolute waste of bits known as pop culture trivia was brought to you by the letters L, O, S, E and R.
Ah... but they have not in fact copyrighted the
numbers. They have copyrighted the musical
representation of these numbers as DTMF tones.
Additionally, like hell numbers aren't copyrightable.
What do you think an mp3 file is? It's a very
large number. In fact EVERYTHING digital is a
number. So if you can't copyright a number, how
then is software, source code, digital music,
digital video copyrightable?
However, I believe that once you are made aware of the copyright you must desist or else you are in violation.
Independent invention is not a violation (unlike patent law.) I could spend months writing the perfect Apple II sprite blitter. You, being equally intelligent and hard-working, independently create the same 60 line routine. We can now both copyright the exact same thing! We both created it, and we can both prevent third parties from copying our work. When Programmer C creates the exactly same routine and uses it in a game, we can both try to sue him. Do we win? If he bought a copy of my game, and he is a known disassembler, then I have a good chance of winning. If you published your routine in a magazine he subscribes to, you will probably win. Otherwise, he gets to copyright the routine as well!
- Charge any (non-profit) corporation when dialing their phones for work related purposes.
- Collect royalties from phone service providers that use the songs for routing in their system.
- Licence the "songs" to telephone manufacturers and receive money for every telephone ever made.
Still, they'll have a pretty hard case trying to get any money out of this. Likewise, anyone who shares a genetic pattern that has been "copyrighted" by another company should sue that company's ass off for copyright infringment on your genetic material.
ahhh, symbolic gestures...
t.
"Corrupting our youth one mind at a time"
They'd only have to copyright twenty tones, not 1 million or whatever, since each tone has two tones making it up, and each digit is based on those combinations. Although there are also the pound, star, and a-d tones as well (although the a-d are really only used on PBX's) but those are irrelevant.
Got friends?
These are the standard DTMF (Dual Tone Modulated Frequency) frequencies are:
1209Hz 1336Hz 1477Hz 1633Hz
697Hz 1 2 3 A (Flash override)
770Hz 4 5 6 B (Flash)
852Hz 7 8 9 C (Immediate)
941Hz * zero # D (Priority)
It's interesting to note that A-D, * and # where not copyrighted, although they are used in telecommunication repeaters.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
And don't forget the much earlier 'Pennsylvania 6-5000' by Glenn Miller's band.
Seems the foggy historical section of my brain recalls a story ("legend") of Steve and Steve creating a machine called a "Black Box" that created the dual tones, and could circumvent long distance charges. They should hold the patent, for articulating these tone pairs...in a unique way - and that was about 30 years ago?
db
Cig:
ôô
If they keep a record of every time someone tests a valid number, they could sell that list to telemarketers at a pretty good price, as the list contains verified numbers of computer-owning housholds. With a con game like that, who needs copyrights?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.
In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.
A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)
Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.
The only real use of ABCD is in military phone systems, such as AUTOVON and it's successors, where they are used to prioritize calls, and if necessary drop the lowest priority calls in times of network stress. The instructions for AUTOVON are Online.
The office where you can get those from is in Denver, CO. Just get yourself in the neighborhood of 6th Avenue and Kipling. You absolutely cannot miss it. I went down one day just for the fun of it and picked up a complete set of (very nice) maps of Mars for $9. The joy of publicly-funded research results actually being available to the public!