DRM for 1'3" of Silence

jc42 writes "In the latest entry in the battle over Digital Rights Management, a fellow has blatantly ripped off a "tune" from the iTunes Store. "Tune" is 1 minute 3 seconds of silence. To compound his crime, he has posted the tune on his web site for anyone to download. I downloaded it to iTunes, and it played just fine (but now I suppose I'm a criminal, too). I wonder what John Cage and Mike Batt would have to say about this? Will lawyers for Apple or Ciccone Youth send a C&D letter? If I were to make my own MP3 silent tune of exactly the same length and put it online, would I be infringing their copyright?"

Comments

This is just dumb.

[Slartibartfast]

Sorry, but no. As I seem to recall, there is a minimum number of notes required in order to copyright something. As a corallary, you could not write a "book" with the contents being the word "the", and then sue everyone for breach of copyright. In other words, raw, unadulturated silence cannot be copyrighted; it needs content.

Re:This is just dumb.

[milgr]

If you have ever seen the score, it has several pages of rests of various lengths. Recordings of performances of this piece include the background noise - including the pianist turning pages of the score, frequently people coughing or shifting restlessly in their seats.

By the way, Cage's piece is "4'33" of silence" (and it does last 4 minutes and 33 seconds).

Not only does it bring up the question of what is Art, but what is copyrightable. There was a suit about this (The suit was settled with John Cage's estate getting a 6 figure settlement). See http://www.billboard.com/bb/article_display.jsp?vn u_content_id=1710115

Already Slashdotted

[BarryJacobsen]

Article is already slashdotted, here's the google cache:

I'm gonna preface this by saying that I love Apple and their products and I hate the RIAA and their shortsightedness. My only complaint with Apple is the restrictive DRM built into iTunes Music Store songs (also, those new G5s could be a little cheaper).

In protest, I've committed a real crime and documented the entire process. But it shouldn't be that way and that's why I've done it. Come and get me, Apple! Come and get me, RIAA!

It all started with a free song code from the Pepsi iTunes promotion. I tilted several Pepsi bottles at the local Ralphs (just look for random letters under the cap), found me a winner and scored a free song.

You may not know this, but there are several tracks that you can buy from that iTunes Music Store that consist of nothing more than total silence.

Here's one from Ciccone Youth (a Sonic Youth side project):

So I bought it.

Then, I wanted to play this song on another device other than my iPod (I own a Creative MuVo TX MP3 Player). No go. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) makes it impossible to transfer the song to my other MP3 player unless I go through some ridiculous steps which involve burning the purchased song to a CD and then ripping it. This causes a noticeable loss of sound quality due to the song being recompressed. Totally unacceptable. I want pure silence.

So I stripped the DRM using JHymn, a cross-platform application that unlocks your DRM'ed songs and keeps the original's sound quality. This is absolutely, positively illegal according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

One law broken, one to go.

One file is legal, the other one is definitely not. Can you spot the one that'll get me in trouble? I'll give you a hint: it's the one without the little lock over its icon.

There's just one law left to break. I'm offering this very file for download here on my website. So go ahead, download it (1.1 MB) and break the law with me. Right click, save as, and crank it up on your favorite portable electronic music player.

If this little stunt gets me in trouble, you'll be the first to know.

You can help stop the RIAA and their nonsense at Downhill Battle.

Find out more about protecting your digital rights online at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website.

Silence is golden. Get involved.

Re:John Cage

[Antibozo]

Moreover, John Cage would explain that 4'33" is not simply 4'33" of silence. He did actually write a score for this piece, note by note, and comprised of three movements. He then made all the notes tacet, and added up their time at a tempo of his choice to come up with the durations for the movements. If you knew what the original notes are, however, you could imagine the piece while it is performed.

In addition, the three movements are punctuated by the performer closing and then reopening the piano lid.

There is a precedence for this...

[Sloppyjoes7]

As evidenced by Mike Batt being sued by the John Cage Trust, people have been sued for copying silence.

Apparently, his minute of silence "infringed" on the late John Cage's 4'33 of silence.

No joke. No legal precedence was set, as the matter was settled out of court. (I wonder how much the trust got out of suing someone for copying silence.)

DMCA does not have jurisdiction

[bill_mcgonigle]

but if he cracked the DRM to access the silence, it is indeed a crime under the DCMA

Not so. The DMCA forbids circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In this case, since silence does not qualify for copyright, you'd be circumventing technological measures that control access to uncopyrighted works, which would not fall under the DMCA.

Re:Wow Compression

[Leto-II]

Even if you use VBR (variable bit rate) compression, the algorithm still tries to average a certain overall bitrate, so the result is the same. It would be nice if you could just say "compress this song using as many bits as you need to make it sound good," but unfortunately the phrase "to make it sound good" is very subjective. The algorithm doesn't know what sounds good.

Bzzt. Wrong. VBR schemes in formats such as OGG, MPC, and others are based on "quality" as opposed to bitrate. There's certainly a correlation between the two, but the idea is to have compression levels linked to quality as opposed to size.

Even with MP3 you can have VBR encodings that go down to 32 bps during silence. Check out LAME's "alt-preset" (just preset in recent revisions) command line options for damn good quality based settings.

See Hydrogen Audio for more information than you could ever want.

Re:John Cage

[Golias]

See the 1990 American Masters documentary on John Cage, in which he states explicitly, "4'33" was written note by note."

As with any dispute of fact, it's Google to the rescue:

4'33" was written in the summer of 1952 just after Cage returned to New York City from Black Mountain College, where he had been invited to participate as a teacher and composer in this rural, private-school environment, and worked with other important figures in the art world. It was here that Rauschenberg did his White Paintings (1951) and Cage first saw them, provoking 4'33". It was here that the first multimedia "happening" occurred, Cage's Theater Piece No. 1, in which many of the faculty participated. It was also here that Cage planned work on Williams Mix and first used the time bracket notation that became so prevalent in his later music.

4'33" is written for any instrument or combination of instruments. It is, however, usually done as a piano piece. This is probably because of the precedent set by the premiere performance, since the score does not specify a piano or any other instrument. The score is in three movements. Curiously, it has existed in at least six different versions (two different manuscripts and four different editions), although only two of these are different in performance.

The original Woodstock manuscript, dated August 1952, is now lost and was written in conventional grand staff notation, containing measures of silence. It is here referred to as the Woodstock ms. It was this score that David Tudor used for the premiere performance. Tudor made at least two reconstructions of this score for his own performances.

The original was on music paper, with staffs, and it was laid out in measures like the Music of Changes except there were no notes. But the time was there, notated exactly like the Music of Changes except that the tempo never changed, and there were no occurrences -- just blank measures, no rests -- and the time was easy to compute. The tempo was 60.

So there you go. No notes. The process of composition being described as "note for note" was just Cage's overcompensation due to his worry about his work being taken as a joke if he did not go out of his way to put effort into creating it.