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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.
Silence isn't the absence of noise...noise is simply the absence of silence. Uncork any bottle and you will likely release the trapped silence within. It's time people really started respecting other's property rights.
Of course, when you think about it, can silence truly exist on Earth (outside of a vacuum chamber)? As long as it has a medium, sound will carry, and being a waveform, and motion will create sound. Seeing as how absolute Zero is impossible, that means there is always motion, thus always sound.
Of course, I never really payed attention in Physics...
"The standard of originality for copyright is low, but it exists. - Feist vs. Rural Telephone Company.
as rediculous as this may sound, couldn't someone claim prior art?
"I've been silent long before that"
Or is that something that only works with patents?
The seeming definition of Speech is "meaning". Anything that can be construed as Speech must have a meaning, a thought to be conveyed. Another way of saying this is Expression. Therefore Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Expression. That's why flag-burning is Speech, it is the expression of some meaning. If one was to spout gibberish in the town square, that too would have some meaning, though possibly only "this is gibberish for its own sake".
So if we come to the conclusion that Speech is defined as some manner of expression that connotes a meaning, we can assume that pure silence is also Speech. Therefore we are only required to deduce Cage's meaning of 4'33 and compare it to Batt's intended meaning of One Minute's Silence. Since we have no other method of determining copyright infringement, as silence is indivisible (you can't musically interpret silence, only lengthen and shorten it), the meaning behind the pieces is the main question.
I have been pwned because my
Interesting point, with two channels, 16 bit samples for each channel, there are a shitload of different silences. Just imagine a single sine wave, 1 minute in duration, 1/60th Hz. :)
Technically not silence in the strictest sense, but not audible in any case. I bet some car audio bass freaks would argue with me, laws of physics never seem to stop them from arguing something.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
How does this bode for CD's with a "secret track" on them? I'm talking about the CD's where on the last track, after the main song is finished, there is about 6 minutes of silence and then some more music or a clip of the band talking and hanging out. Do all these CD's infringe on the copyright?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
I find it interesting that this is coming up, if only because I happened to be at a performance of 4'33" on Friday, and that performance most certainly was recorded! (4'33" was actually just a warm up for the main work, a masterful performance of "Sontas and Interludes for Prepared Piano", and it worked very well as a warm up.)
If anything, I'd say that an absolute blank on the disk is closer to Cage's original intent than a recording of a live performance. It forces the listener to strain his ears trying to figure out what's going on, resulting in him listening to ambient sounds. Since that was Cage's exact intent, it seems to me that it really is a copy of his work. It certainly isn't a ridiculous thing to argue about.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Interesting thought. I think it depends on how you listen to the CD. If you're concentrating on something else (say, you put the headphones on while you're coding), you don't strain your ears. At a live concert, you have a more captive and focussed audience.
Of course it would be a strange person indeed who used Cage as background music. But then, I occasionally put on THRaKaTTaK while coding, so who am I to judge?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
You don't get it all. The problem is this -
"which I credit Batt/Cage just for a laugh"
The estate of John Cage is upset that the composition in question is credited to John Cage.
There is an assertion in the notes that:
1. John Cage is the author.
2. John Cage or his estate approved of this "performance"
3. John Cage or his estate approved of shortening 4'33" down to just a bit more than a fifth its original length ( or playing it five times as fast I guess )
Imagine for a moment how much lawyer exhaust you would land in if you claimed to have a previously unrecorded collaboration between yourself and John Lennon.
From the sounds of this article I take it that this is all taking place in the UK. Mike Batt is lucky he isn't getting sued for libel and maybe fraud.
I don't think the silence itself has anything to do with this case.
...of that guy who put together a compilation of "1-minute silences". He just got the audio recordings of all the respective happenings (Lady Di memorial, whatever) and cut out the 1-minute silence period which by definition was not quite silent - you would hear distand police sirens, people couging, whatever.
Back when I read about it, I thought that it was way too ridiculoud to be topped. Well, this story got me.
+++ath0
And the reason John Cage's piece is 4'33" is because that is 273 seconds, and absolute zero is -273C (near as makes no odds). It all makes sense now...
Oh yeah, didn't the Bloudhound Gang do a track called "The Ten Best Things About New Jersey" which was 10 seconds of silence?
Baz
Secondly, (quoted from azstarnet)
One would imagine that Blatt's silence would be a digital silence - no noise, a silent file he generated and slapped on a CD. Cage's silence (not that it is silence as outlined above), since it is much older, would probably have at least white noise in it on a recording. Clearly since Cage did not believe that silence could exist neither he nor his estate could claim ownership of silence.
F4+80y +1++135
FatBoy Titties - (aren't I l33+
Let me see if I understand correctly. Not only is nothing now something, but someone owns it, and will sue if you use it. I hope this lawsuit will point out to legislators and courts worldwide how copyrights, patents, and other "intellectual property" laws no longer stimulate innovation or creativity, but have become nothing but a money grab scam. The following sentance used to be a double-negative, but is now perfect english. Don't buy nothing from the recording industry.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I seem to recall a similar piece entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Regan"
It seems that this joke dates at least back to the 1980's
Prior art?
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
While we can all applaud John Cage for this attempt to introduce even more surrealism to the copyright debate, I might also mention that back in the 80's AT&T made, in all seriousness, a copyright claim on blank lines.
/bin/true program, which along with /bin/false is part of every unix system library. It's a bit of trivia, but these commands are needed for some scripting applications. The "true" command is a command that merely exits with a successful (zero) status. Its most common use was for a "while true do ..." infinite loop.
...
This was in the
The script actually contained no code, since its behavior is the default action of a shell script if there is no code. However, it did contain two significant pieces of text.
It contained a blank line, and an AT&T copyright notice.
I had a bit of fun at the time posting the program in its entirety to several newsgroups, pointing out that I was openly and knowingly publishing the full source code for an AT&T copyrighted program, and I challenged their lawyers to sue me for infringment.
I never heard from them. This is a bit strange, since, although they might not have been following any of the tech newsgroups, they almost certainly would have received copies of my message from a lot of readers.
We had several good discussions of whether we should go through all our files and delete all the blank lines to comply with the AT&T copyright.
It wasn't clear whether AT&T was claiming ownership of only the blank lines in shell scripts, all programs, all files, or all documents (on disk or paper). If I'd ever heard from any AT&T lawyers, I would have asked them.
Maybe we can actually get such things resolved now. I'll predict that the Cage folks will be happy to discuss the issue with us
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Reminds me of the Melvins' track off "Prick" entitled "Pure Digital Silence." Basically, it's just a guy saying in a gravelly voice, "And now, pure digital silence," followed by a minute or so of silence.
Or their cover of John Cage's 4'33" which they retitled "Shit Sandwich (and you just took a bite)" because they also released it on a limited pressing of vinyl. They've been performing this "song" at shows recently... it's sort of a different reaction from the crowd of a rock show than it is at a classical concert!