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Copyright Battle Over Nothing
An Anonymous Coward writes: "In this story reported at The Independent is "one of the more curious copyright disputes of modern times." It appears that the key question is "which part of the silence was stolen." If only this was April First. This is a lawsuit suing over the sound of nothing, no sound, silence, nada, zilch, bupkiss.
Also keep in mind this piece was premiered in an open air theatre in the forest. There would likely have been much more than silence heard.
And this isn't even getting into the idea that it is impossible to actually hear silence.
So it looks like this was just a standard form letter that was sent out because Batt jokingly credited cage as a composer.
Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds) was mostly an experiment into the nature of silence.
Cage actually spent a lot of time researching Zen teachings. His research into silence eventually led him to Harvard University and a visit to its Anechoic Chamber - a closed environment supposedly complete free of noise.
"While he literally expected to hear nothing, after leaving the chamber, Cage explained to a nearby engineer that he had heard two sounds in the chamber, one high, and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and that the low sound was his blood circulating"
The point of 4'33" was to state that there is no such thing as silence. For more info, check out this paper by Andrew Schulze on the subject.
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Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
And it's a piece intended to be performed live, the musician plays nothing but the audience is moving in their chairs, whispering about what's going on, coughing, sneezing etc. and this is the beauty of Cage's piece. It's different everytime.
no
it was very much a deliberate work
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
It appears that the producer actually makes reference to Cage in the credits - in fact, gives him credit for the track. In that light, this would seem to be at least somewhat derivative. Still absurd, but not quite as absurd as it would seem otherwise.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I have no idea why I even bother...
Have you perchance noticed the line:
memset(silence, 0, sizeof(silence));
Hmm... I wonder what it does. Set's the the memory array, pointed to by silence to zero? Up until the size of silence?
Why do people post replies before they read the original posts?
As such, this piece can never really be recorded
Cage's point was to take this even further. What he's saying is that no piece can really be recorded. It's called nondeterminism.
Welcome to Slashdot, where Copyright == Trademark.
It even says on the page you linked: "'Have Fun!' is a registered trademark of Pat O'Brien's".
Which is still somewhat absurd, but they probably do have some legal ground - if some competing establishment tried to use "Have Fun!" as a slogan, it would justifiably be considered trademark infringement.
If the words "Have Fun!" really were considered a copyrightable work of literature, it would indeed be the most ludicrous copyright ever, so it's rather nice that that's entirely untrue.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
even if Mickey Mouse became public domain
You forget, Micky Mouse IS in the public domain. Here's the legal reasoning.
Actually, Cage's ideas about 4'33'' changed several times during his life. Of particular interest here is that, when he first thought of the idea of a silent piece in 1948, his intent was to sell it to Muzak (so he could get some peace & quiet in elevators, I suppose). So the notion of collecting royalties on it now just brings the piece back to its beginning ...
Track 3 on the Mind Games album. 3 seconds long, 3 seconds of silence. The album was released November 1973.
20kHz is the average upper limit of human hearing. Some of us are able to hear higher frequencies, allowing us to do stupid party tricks like complaining about TVs that are left on with no video signal feeding them. But I digress.
One day in a physics lab during my freshman year of college, we were doing audio interference experiments and, after finishing early, I started playing with the audio oscillator I had been assigned. According to this test (which was, admittedly, likely to be somewhat less than 100% accurate) I was capable of hearing sounds up to about 23.5kHz and could sense vibrations up to around 25kHz, although these were perceived as something more like a pressure on my head rather than as sound.
So I have no difficulty in believing that the earlier poster was at one point able to hear up to 25kHz.
There have been a few other cases like this. Another is Bridgeman vs. Corel, in which a court ruled that taking a 2D picture of an artwork for which copyright has expired does not create a copyrightable image. No originality. So Corel's clip-art disk, made from museum slides of old paintings, was OK.