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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.
If a tree falls in the forest..... is it liable for infringement?
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
I hereby copyright the sound of a tree falling in the middle of a forest when no one is around to hear it. This is in addition to my copyright on the sound of one hand clapping. These copyrights shall be persued by the fullest extent of the law.
Ok...
...
Done? Ok suckers, that will be $1000 per person for infringing upon the silence copyright made payable to FU Attorneys At Law. Pay up or else!!
How can the absence of something be called a copyright violation? Unless you're looking at the quantum superstate of blank media (which would mean that anything that can exist on blank media would exist on it until it was observed), which would further enrage the RIAA and push them to sue people who produce blank media.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Unless i am not reading the entire article, it doesn't say anything about a lawsuit...
its 4 paragraphs and only says "I've received a letter on behalf of John Cage's music publishers. I was in hysterics when I read their letter."
and the guy credited them anyways.....
fun fun
void main()
{
short silence[60*44100];
memset(silence, 0, sizeof(silence));
FILE * out = fopen("silence.pcm", "w");
fwrite(silence, sizeof(short), 60*44100, out);
fclose(out);
}
Music piracy at its worst, I tell ya.
As long as people are throwing out one-liners:
"You don't have the right to remain silent. Anything you don't say will be used against you in a court of law..."
© gvonk, 2002, all rights reserved, etc.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
"The standard of originality for copyright is low, but it exists. - Feist vs. Rural Telephone Company.
The song (both versions) is one of my favorites. It's so catchy. I've had it stuck in my head whenever I didn't have another song stuck in my head... ;-)
Wrong.
Silence isn't nothing, at least not on a CD. The infringing track is sixty seconds of silence, which is not sixty seconds of zeros. (Which would still be something, mind you.) In any case, the track in the suit is 5,292,000 '0111111111111111's on the CD. (60 seconds, 44100 samples per second, 2 channels, at "zero", but recall digital audio is signed so that's 2^15-1 = 32767.)
Even if one of the two decided to use 32768 instead, the prosecution could argue there was a DC bias...
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.
I think the theory behind John Cage's 4'33" is not so much that it's a silent piece, but rather to get the audience to listen to ambient "noise" around them. The music is produced by the environment, not by the piano. You could call it conceptual art. There's a good article here.
With this in mind, I wonder what direction the legal case should take...
John Cage's piece, 4'33", was actually very clever and quite a novel idea for its time.
One of the themes of his work is to let sounds be themselves. To that end, he composed a piece which involved a pianist holding his hands over a piano keyboard for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The music was not silence, but rather the sound of the audience slowly realising to what was going on.
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.
Mike Batt's problem is crediting Cage on the album. Yes, he did it for a laugh, but by doing so, did he inadvertantly claim legal liability?
Personally, I think John Cage would have gotten a real kick out of the whole proceedings. It would have appealed to his sense of whimsy.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
From the article: "They say they are claiming copyright on a piece of mine called 'One Minute's Silence' on the Planets' album, which I credit Batt/Cage just for a laugh. But my silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence."
This sounds very silly, but maybe there is a valid point to be made. Mike Batt has a silent track on his album, apparently in something of an homage to avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage. To reinforce the connection he even co-credits Cage on the track (but presumably isn't giving out any royalties).
If he simply left a minute of silence on his album (without the credit) then I'd definitely think that there's nothing there. However, by crediting Cage (even as a joke or a tribute) he has opened himself up to charges of copyright infringement and/or misrepresentation.
Without even "listening", one would get the impression (from his liner notes) that his work either draws from Cage, or is co-authored by him. This goes beyond copyright - for instance, even if Mickey Mouse became public domain, no one using should ever be allowed to pretend to be either Disney or to be authorized by Disney (without their permission).
IANAL, but to me there are two valid reasons for IP laws. The first is to encourage dissemination of ideas by rewarding creativity. This is the one that is generally criticized, since the method of reward (monopoly etc.) is somewhat arbitrary and frequently abused. The other reason for IP protection is to prevent misrepresentation. This concept should always be upheld, even regardless of whether a copyright, patent, or trademark has expired.
I appreciate the subtle satire achieved by crediting Cage, but in this case it leaves the potential for confusion and the impression that Cage has contributed to and is getting reimbursed for the work. The lawyers might not agree, but Cage should either pay up, remove the credit only, or (my preferred choice) clearly identify the work (including the credit, which has artistic merit) as a non-derivative tribute/satire.
PS. Sorry about the pun's (unintentional, honest).
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
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
Hey, all you canucks out there - no need to pay blank media taxes on cd-rs... they're not blank. they're simply recordings of a cover of 4'33" :-)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Oh wait this is Slashdot, no one will get that.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Former US President Richard Nixon can claim prior art on this. He recorded 18 and a half minutes of silence back in the 70s.
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
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.
Watch out, the record company are probably distributing dummy mp3s with the first 15secs repeated over and over ...
Regards, Ralph.
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+
I wasn't going to enter a response to this article, but I was afraid of receiving a cease and desist order if I remained silent.
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.