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.

Comments

Other than the obvious....

[gmaestro]

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.

Re:The most ludicrous Copyright ever! "Have Fun!"

[PurpleBob]

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.