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

Supreme Court opinion on this

[Animats]

"The standard of originality for copyright is low, but it exists. - Feist vs. Rural Telephone Company.

I wonder...

[GrandCow]

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?

Re:John Cage and 4'33"

[rgmoore]

As such, this piece can never really be recorded (unless you actually record an audience listening to it, and even then, it's not the same thing; once the sound is recorded, it is no longer the same kind of performance), and claiming that a recording of silence is even close to being the same thing as 4'33" is ludicrous.

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.

Re:Don't be an idiot...

[HughsOnFirst]

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.

Re:John Cage and 4'33" and The Bloodhound Gang

[Bazman]

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

Sounds iffy to me ..

[FatBoy Titties]

Firstly, I was under the impression that 4'33" was more of a performance piece.

Secondly, (quoted from azstarnet)

4'33", pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds", (Cage himself referred to it as "four, thirty-three") is often mistakenly referred to as Cage's "silent piece". He made it clear that he believed there is no such thing as silence, defined as a total absence of sound. In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. This was a major revelation that was to affect his compositional philosophy from that time on. It was from this experience that he decided that silence defined as a total absence of sound did not exist. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot," he wrote. "One need not fear for the future of music."

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.

AT&T owns copyright on blank lines

[jc42]

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.

This was in the /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.

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 ...