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Copyright Battle Over Nothing

Posted by chrisd on from the sound-of-one-hand-clapping dept.

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.

6 of 474 comments (clear)

  1. Other than the obvious.... by gmaestro · · Score: 4, Informative
    There are serious problems with this claim. First of which, Cage scorned the idea that 4'33" was a "silent piece." First, there are theatrical elements of David Tudor's premiere that I'm guessing are absent from this recording. Also, 4'33" is a piece in 3 movements of random length, provided that the sum their lengths equals 4'33".

    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.

  2. Probably a mistake... by alphaseven · · Score: 3, Informative
    From this L.A. Times article: Gene Caprioglio, a representative of Cage's American publisher, explained that the British organization that collects royalties had sent its standard license form to Batt. No one had sent a letter to Batt, he maintained--enraged or otherwise.

    So it looks like this was just a standard form letter that was sent out because Batt jokingly credited cage as a composer.

  3. Re:John Cage's 4'33" by danox · · Score: 3, Informative

    no

    it was very much a deliberate work

    --
    "Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
  4. Re:I'll right (sic) your copy! by russianspy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  5. Re:The most ludicrous Copyright ever! "Have Fun!" by PurpleBob · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  6. Re:Supreme Court opinion on this by Animats · · Score: 3, Informative
    That's the decision, incidentally, in which the Court ruled that telephone books are not copyrightable. The presentation and layout may be copyrighted, but if you scan them in and extract the raw data, that's OK. The basic idea is that copyright protects creativity, not effort.

    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.