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.
Jenny, Jenny who can I turn to
You give me something I can hold on to
I know you'll think I'm like the others before
Who saw your name and number on the wall
Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your number
8 6 7-5 3 0 9
Well, now I'll have to get a rotary cell phone so I can call home without paying royalties!
Ooo!Ooo! I know what these guys can do for us - sue Hillary Rosen or any RIAA member when they have to call each other in order to make thier little cabal plans. Could you imagine the scowl on her *cough*lovely*cough* face?
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I just copyrighted all the possible combinations of pulse dialing tones too... ahhahahahhah... you all owe me 0.05 cents per use... I'm rich!! I'm rich!!! ahaahhahahha
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
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
I forsee the following dialouge:
:-)
Me: hello?
Tele-solicitor: Hello would you like to buy-
Me: You have just infringed on national copyright hangup now or I will seize all your assets!
Tele-solicitor: *click*
Ah finally a good use for copyright
This very large series of algorithmic compositions originate from the early 1970's (our diatonic period) and were inspired by the pitch class set pieces of Webern and the stochastic works of Xenakis.
The Magnus-Opus series is based upon pairings of eight notes used to create sixteen different diads or two note chords. These tone pairs are used to create melody 'modules' of a standard twelve note length. Additional compositions may be obtained by joining melodies together, or by adding melody fragments to standard twelve note melodies.
Our method was to assign each of the sixteen tone pairs to an alpha-numeric pattern so that each letter or digit corresponded to a pitch pair. This sequence when expressed through the operation of a simple algorithmic generator produces some 10,000,000,000 melodies (together with a more or less infinite number of additional compositions produced by the addition of melody modules or fragments thereof).
It is not without reason, therefore, that we claim to be the world's most prolific composers, hence Magnus-Opus.
It has, more recently, come to our attention that many (certainly not all) of these compositions correspond to the tonal sequences transmitted in contemporary telecommunication, making us without doubt, the world's most popular composers.
Warning: All of the melodies contained within the Magnus-Opus series are protected by copyright. You may inadvertently be in breach of international copyright law by using a telecommunications device (telephone, mobile telephone, modem and other internet devices) to transmit and perform one of the Magnus-Opus melody series.
In order to ascertain if you are in breach of international copyright law you may test your number against our composition database by clicking here.
What, me worry?
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
--
Join
So, even if they have a phone number in their melody database, you don't infringe if you dial that number, because you created the melody independently.
Good thing I'm not six years old anymore and no longer so easilly amused; I'd hate to have to retain a lawyer just to determine if I could do that; especially on a six-year-old's allowance.
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.
So, who wants to help me encode all these 100,000,000,000 possible ringtones and put them on Morpheus?
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.
Registering or claiming copyright protection and actually winning an infringement claim are two very different things.
Copyright (at least in the United States) only applies to ``original works of authorship,'' not ``[w]orks consisting entirely of information that is common property and containing no original authorship.''
Perhaps the authors could receive protection for the entire compilation, but not for the telephone numbers taken individually.
Many Slashdot readers would do well to read the U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 1, Copyright Basics, from which the above quotations were taken.
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
From their Site...
" Magnus-Opus
You may be inadvertently performing one of the Magnus-Opus melody series each time you use your telecommunications device (telephone, mobile telephone, modem and other internet devices).
In order to ascertain if you are in breach of international copyright law you may enter any alpha-numeric sequence you may be using via your telecommunications device in our dialogue box below. This will compare your number with our melody database. If your number should match one of our compositions the melody and opus number will be displayed. You should then complete a licence agreement as soon as possible. "
Lol... this is too funny
Tommy Tutone be warned. Prepare to be sued by some rich guy with a lawyer waiting to
serve him that owns the patent to the phone number 867-5309 that you illegally sang
back in the 70s.
You will be sued, resistance is futile!
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.
If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office, Microsoft can't sue.
The problem is that you'll need 256^{size of MS Office in bytes} monkeys to get MS Office. Phone numbers only required 10^11 monkeys, so it was possible to simulate the process with a computer.
Well this means that every online yellow/white pages directory is now in violation of the DMCA.
And while we're at it, we'll have to dispose of our phonebooks since they are now vulnerable to lawsuits of patent infringement.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to patent IP addresses.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Everyone on this site should remember this fact when Intel changed their chip naming scheme from numbers, 8086, 286, 486 etc. to Pentium and Pentium Pro etc. The reason for this was that the numbers could be neither copyrighted nor trademarked and other manufacturers were able to call their chips 486 as well thus leading to a loss of brand value for intel.
...I'll be sure to dial a few extra digits after the number. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?
Actually, phone books are copyrighted. You can't legally copy lists of names and phone numbers from the phone book to make your own phone book for sale. Same for maps, which I always thought was the stupidest thing. A basic outline of the US is copyrighted. It is just a shape. A really bumpy shape. But if it is in a child's coloring book, it is copyrighted.
If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office.
Isn't that how it was written in the first place anyway?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office, Microsoft can't sue. Likewise, if you happen to create a series of dual-tone meta frequency notes using a touch-tone phone using non-copyrighted material (a phone book, your memory, etc), then that's an independant creation. Now if a telemarketer overheard you dialing, and recorded it (made a copy), then you might have something.
According to this, I think, if I check to see if my number or somebody I know's number is in there, and it is, and then I use it I'll have gotten help from copyrighted material to dial that number. I'm infringing their copyright every time I dial a number after I see it there. Q.E.D that website is a trap to make you infringe their copyright! Don't be fooled!
No sig for you.
That's 321-2333, not 312-2333. Unfortunately, if you want to play the whole melody on the phone, there is no way to accurately represent the 5th (the 12th and 13th notes in the melody), but hitting 8 comes close since you hear (the 852Hz component of the 8 is heard as a fifth below the second, which is at 1336Hz - see the DTMF tutorial for where I got this info). Of course, its pointless for someone to waste their valuable time sitting there and trying to figure this stuff out like I just spent the last 20 minutes.
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Mary had a little lamb
2 2 2
Little lamb
3 8 8
Little lamb
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Mary had a little lamb
3 2 2 3 2 1 1
Whose fleece was white as snow, and
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Everywhere that Mary went
2 2 2
Mary went
3 8 8
Mary went
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Everywhere that Mary went
3 2 2 3 2 1 8 1
Her lamb was sure to go-o-o
DH
"Fsck you dirty hippie!"
Music doesn't only consist of tones. It also consists of durations of notes. Mozart wouldn't be mozart if you changed whole notes to eigth notes, quarters to halves, and so on. So, unless they've also patented every single note duration/ pitch variation possibility (not likely) there are at LEAST 100,000,000,000 ^ 7 melodies. Not including dotted notes, that's ^ 14. I think.
No sig for you.
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?
Here's a link to the Feist Publications vs. Rural Telephone Service Co 1991 US Supreme Court ruling on phone book copyrightability. Note they mention originality as a constitutional requirement for copyright protection - an outline of the US is only copyrightable if it has an original element to it (otherwise it doesn't promote the arts and sciences).
People don't seem to have noticed that finicky little disclaimer under the score of their telephone number:
e t.html#c2)
"Notation is an approximation only of the real pitch."
(See: http://www.magnus-opus.com/number_check.html)
The Equitempered Scale (or Equal Tempered Scale, depending on who you talk to) has pretty much been the standard for musical notes for the last 200 years, although the standard for A4 was only ratified as 440Hz in 1939.
The frequencies used for DTMF tones don't exactly match notes on the Equitempered Scale. I have tabulated the differences here:
Matching against the Equitempered scale:
(Based on http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/
DTMF_tone Closest_Note %-error
697Hz F5, 698.46Hz +0.2095%
770Hz G5, 783.99Hz +1.8169%
852Hz G5#, 830.61Hz -2.5106%
941Hz A5#, 932.33Hz -0.9214%
1209Hz D6, 1174.6Hz -2.8453%
1336Hz E6, 1318.5Hz -1.3099%
1477Hz F6#, 1480.0Hz +0.2031%
1633Hz G6#, 1661.2Hz +1.7269%
As you can see, there are some considerable differences from a "purist" point of view.
This begs the question: Have the Magnus-Opus musicians actually copyrighted DTMF tone sequences, or just an approximation of them?
Another question worth asking: Even if the copyright holds-up, is it the end-users who are liable for infringement, or the Telco's who are on-selling the numbers as their own property?
--------
Eletus99
Whenever one of these crazy copyright/patent stories comes up I am reminded of the story Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros.
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
If it had been done at random by monkeys there would be fewer bugs. Now aplogise for insulting the monkeys.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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
Map makers used to put in little false details here and there to make sure their maps weren't being copied. A street here or there that didn't exist in real life.
I always thought that was fiendishly clever.
I wonder if they still do it - I've always suspected that Montana doesn't really exist...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Just look at this article...
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can attest for sure, as a cartographer, that ALL map companies do in fact still produce inaccuracies, and quite intentionally. If you actually went to the trouble of comparing street maps to an orthorectified image (a.k.a., terraserver.com) of the same area, you would see that the map practically looks made up. Map companies, if they went to the trouble of checking, could easily tell if one of their maps had been copied. By the way, if you're looking for accurate maps to copy, USGS topo maps are far more accurate than any other maps available. They are made from the aforementioned orthophotos. And they are all in the public domain. They're not always up to date, however.
I have a feeling they may just be printing out a musical script of each sequence of numbers entered and then saying its copyrighted.
I entered characters.. they still said it was found and coprighted, but didn't display any notes in the score..
hmm
Isn't that how it was written in the first place anyway?
Or three monkeys, two hours. Might have been a rat-dance or a whirlwind, actually. That's more coherent.
Scientists have proposed models that are as probable as "whirlwinds going through junkyards, and assembling a Boeing 747". Maybe MS Office is that sort of event.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I award this article the Worst Slashdot Lawyers Ever award. Not a single legally valid opinion is ranked above 3. Several utterly uninformed opinions are ranked at 4 or 5. Half the replies miss the point. Absolutely amazingly horrible. A record high noise/signal ratio. Wow.
Please for Gnu's sake don't whip off a letter to your Congresscritter based on this article; most posters have already looked stupid enough.
(Oh, in case you're wondering, the subject of this article is a funny-chortle, but no more. It has all the legal force of a Taliban edict in this country.)
http://www.3dactionplanet.com/citizenc/magnus_opus _phone_test.shtml
The Magnus-Opus domain has been slashdotted to the extent that it is impossible to access their "test-your-phone-number" flash movie. It is mirrored above.
Numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted. Try sending in a copyright application for a number and watch it get rejected.
*However* suppose that a song is written and copyrighted. All well and good. Now it is coverted into an MP3. The MP3 is a directly derived work, and is still copyrighted similarly. If a number is a derived from that MP3 or WAV file, it is still directly derived from the original piece, and thus copyrighted just the same.
Copyrights are always about works themselves (of protected classes, of course) and their derivations. If some text/song/art/whatever is put into another form directly representing the original, the copyright works just the same.
Note: I am not a lawyer nor copyright expert. But this sure seems logical to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.
The shape of the USA is not Copyrighted, the representation of it in a particular map can be Copyrighted. If I spend millions of dollars accurately mapping the cost of the USA, I want protection from you just ripping off all that survey work. Because anyone else's map of the USA will (hopefully) look the same, I will add artefacts ("watermarks") so that I can prove that a particular map was copied from my work.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
A verifiable example.. Use your favorite street maping program. Look where I-205 crosses the Columbia River at Portland Oregon. Compare it to where the bridge really is. Bombs guided by GPS would miss the bridge by about 1/8 mile. Most maps have it East of it's real location. It's fun to cross it with a maping GPS.
The truth shall set you free!
Where else but slashdot does a person get to make a post like mine and have someone step through the crowd and say "I'm a cartographer..."
Sometimes I really like slashdot.
Thanks -
Jim in Tokyo (IANAC)
-- My Weblog.
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.
36-24-36 is not just a telephone number, but the dimensions of a perfectly shaped woman.
In Feist Publication v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340, 111 S. Ct. 1282, 113 L. Ed. 2d 358 (1991), for example, the Supreme Court held that the arrangement of names and numbers in the white pages of a telephone book was not copyrightable as simply listing the names in alphabetical order was not even remotely creative.
"Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free
to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing
a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the
same selection and arrangement."
A million monkeys could type out all of Microsoft's source code?
Ha! So that would explain [insert MS product name here] !
{BTW, all possible software-product permutations of this joke are hereby copyrighted, so this IS on-topic.}
No, they only used about 3,000.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Mapquest does. The directions to our new office yesterday, printed from Mapquest, got us fairly well lost. The last to turns were onto streets that apparently don't exist within a mile or two of our destination. I guess us getting lost in a rental van that was acting like it was going to crap out at any time in the middle of fairly busy streets populated by hideously incompentent drivers and 2-ton dump trucks is a small price to pay to keep people from printing out copyrighted maps from Mapquest.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Where do they find morons to design websites that DON'T WORK without flash? Dipshits.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
they just emit a sad beep no matter what button you press.
This ruling led to the rise of "wannabee" phone directories (which we've had in California for over a decade). The compilers don't copy the yellow pages ads, or any data processing such as separation of business and residence numbers, but they can legally reprint the raw listings.
... and yellow pages advertisers are forced to buy their ads twice, one in each publication. Sad.)
(What's pathetic is that the wannabee phone books come out a few months after the telco's, and with a prettier cover, so people actually discard the official phone book
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
My phone number in 1980 when that song was big was an anagram of Jenny's number. I always wondered if I would get a call from some dyslexic rock fan.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Why can't you see that this is a hoax? Is it really that difficult to find out?
You can query that number finding thingie with everything. It will always print that the number is licensed, even if you just enter some letters...
my 0.02
The list is not necessarily a list of used numbers. The telemarketers could easily produce such a list themselves. The trick is to get names and demographic info along with the number.
Dyolf Knip
This is well-settled. No copyright is possible.
The Supreme Court held in Feist that the white pages do not meet the burden of originality, and therefore cannot be protected by Copyright.
The word, "Science," as used in the Patent and Copyright Clause, has nothing to do with "scientific research."
"Science" refers to the archaic meaning of literary technique, or, the "craft of writing." "Useful Arts" refers to patentable technology.
36-24-36
see a girl walkin' down the street
just the kind of girl that I'd like to meet
it ain't her hair, her clothes, her feet
somethin' much more discreet
now I ain't loud baby I ain't proud
I just want what I'm not allowed
movin on up & help myself
do a world of good for my mental health
36-24-36
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Except that you can't copyright something that doesn't have "signficant creative effort", and I doubt if either the 16 DTMF codes nor the possible dialings sequences from them qualify.
*grins*
I am indeed quite anal, or at least that's what some people say; however, it seems to me that the first implementation of DTMF most likely could provide compelling evidence that they were the original performers of the melodies that have been copyrighted. In fact, I'd be willing to believe that routine testing for telco switches includes testing with some large portion of that address space.
Of course, it seems simpler to just turn off the dial-time speaker on your phone (pardon, not using digital?). It seems kind of unlikely that a musical copyright could be held on a string of digits, even if it was granted on the musical arrangement that is 'played' by the DTMF switching.
This suggest a whole new business/income model. Perhaps we should patent it before some corporate monster does
1) Copyright your number, including dial tone.
2) Allways complete your phone-number on forms, and request for information. Include notification that use of your number is by licence only.
3) Receive call(s).
4) Charge abusers licence fee.
I believe there was a lawsuit several years ago about copying lists of names and phone numbers to make your own phone book.
And it turned out to be legal, however only copying the information is legal, copying the formatting (probably ads as well) is not.
Need a Catering Connection
Dude. They'd be 'sampling'. So not only would they owe a royalty for the use of the original 'phone number' but a fee to Puff 'Sean Diddy' Daddy for licensing his buisness method patent.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
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!
You just wait until P. Diddy starts sampling these tunes.
I bet He buys J-Lo's new number.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Congratulations, it *is* a gentle and friendly satire (with a little self-deprecating humor thrown in) of Bruce's old sig, which he instituted a while back due to the confusion caused when others created user accounts with extremely similar names with an easily overlooked difference, such as appending a period, and then proceeded to post stuff that the real Bruce never would. Sort of like our current Cmdr Taco on, which comes up as "Cmdr Taco on on 09:27 AM September 10th, 2001" where the second "on" is easily overlooked if you don't expect it. I made up the time and day in that example. They have no particular significance, I just didn't feel like going to the trouble of hunting up some troll's real posting.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"Primordial Soup, it's what's for dinner!"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I gotta quit posting so much. Starting tomorrow. Or right after the weekend. Anyway, real soon now.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.