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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?"
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?
No. First of all, no one has a copyright on any length of pure silence. You can copyright SOUND RECORDINGS. Pure silence is the absence of sound, and is therefore not copyrightable.
However, you could record yourself sitting in front of a piano (ala Cage) and the various ambient sounds recorded would technically be a unique work, and as the original author you would own the copyright on that SOUND RECORDING.
This guy is violating the DRM agreements that Apple set forth, so Apple could pursue him.
As explained above, the pure silence is not copyrightable, so the RIAA has no beef.
If the guy forgot to remove the album artwork from the file, then he is infringing the copyright of whoever owns the album artwork copyright, and they could sue him.
What is he really trying to prove? The point is lost on me due to his ineptitude.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Let me get this straight. Someone makes a "song" that's 1m 3s of silence. Some other guy makes an audio file that is 1m 3s of silence. He's daring someone to sue him, and everyone here is already screaming about it? No one's done anything! Apple hasn't sued. The artist hasn't sued. The RIAA hasn't sued. What's the big deal?
it is dumb to sell "songs" that are actually nothing more than silence. i think that is pretty ridiculous.
Not at all! Have you never been talking in a bar when the jukebox starts blaring? I would have loved to been able to buy a minute of silence!
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Yes, it does sound absurd, but I really don't think this is splitting hairs because it is specifically addressing the extent to which the DMCA can be enforced. This could very well become a "test case" that might prove to be important.
Then again...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Exactly. The issue isn't copyright per se but copy protection. It doesn't matter if the thing being protected is copyrighted or not, because the protection itself is protected. You could get in trouble for breaking DRM even if the content is public domain, because Congress says the imaginary box containing that individual copy is sacred.
If you think about it, DRM is like a privatized turbo version of copyright. Copyright infringement is a civil matter between two parties. DRM breakage is a federal crime involving fines and jail time. Pretty sweet deal to have the government investigate and prosecute your lawsuits for you for free! How did we let the entertainment industry get away with this?
You're confusing the manuscript with the writing process. As with a number of Cage's pieces, the actual notes were chosen using chance operations. The fact that the manuscript had no notes written on it is due to the notes' already having been rendered tacet. No doubt there is a page somewhere in the world where Cage wrote down the operations and their result before producing the manuscript you are referring to.
Similarly, Cage once made a film of a chess game he played with Marcel Duchamp, wherein the exposure settings for the film camera were determined by chance operations. Parts of the film are completely black. This doesn't mean there wasn't a chessboard in the frame; it means that the process didn't record its image. The manuscript for 4'33" is like the black segments of the chess film--the image is there, but the notes have been erased.
If you actually go back and read the document you quoted, without attribution, among many other details, you'll find the following quote from Cage:
We may never know whether the notes Cage wrote for 4'33" had pitches. It may be that he didn't generate enough chance data to derive pitches from, or that he merely didn't bother to extract the pitch information from his data, since it wasn't needed. In the latter case, if we knew the process and had the data, we could indeed produce the pitches to go along with the durations.
But assuming, for the sake of [your] argument, that no information for pitches was ever even generated, we could have a semantic debate as to whether durations by themselves, without pitch, constitute "notes". The fact is that, underlying 4'33", at the very least, there is a sequence of durations of specific durations. These constitute a rhythm; would you argue that a specific rhythm written out on a score to be played on a snare drum is not written "note by note"? Now take away the snare drum.
Finally, consider that rests often occur in places where a specific pitch is expected, such as the middle of a phrase; one hears the pitch in one's mind even though it is not heard. 4'33" can be regarded as a piece where all of the notes are expected, yet heard only in one's mind. It illustrates how the act of listening for music enables the mind to hear it, even if the guy at the piano isn't touching any keys.