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

Re:Well

[pla]

Or do you think they mught just be committing quiet obscenities? Better ban it anyway just in case.

Why not? They went after The Kingsmen for "Louie Louie", taking its unintelligibility as "proof" that it has nasties in it...

Precedent

[alphakappa]

What kind of legal precedent would this create if it ever came to court? On one hand he has probably violated the DMCA by circumventing the copy-protection on the song. On the other hand, all he has is a song that is devoid of any content. (Could you compare it to a thief who broke into a house only to find it empty - would it not be a crime, if he knew beforehand that the house was empty?)

Plenty of questions to be debated here..

Old news

[thebra]

This has been done.

Still dumb, but I'll answer, anyway.

[Slartibartfast]

White noise has content. So, sure, go ahead and copyright -your- white noise. But, so long as someone else didn't mimic yours (which wouldn't be too hard -- or even desired, what with white noise being essentially random), they'd be fine. In other words, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, "Just put your TV between channels, pump up the volume, and listen to the wonderful white noise." And not sweat the copyright.

But it may be a DCMA violation.

[L-Train8]

Well, it may not be copyright infringement, but if he cracked the DRM to access the silence, it is indeed a crime under the DCMA. Which is one of the big problems with the DCMA. Even if you have a legal right to the material that is copy protected, you cannot crack the copy protection without committing a crime.

Re:This is just dumb.

[Pionar]

It has nothing to do with how many notes. It's whether it's marginally creative. In this case, I think it'd be up to a judge. A consumer would argue that silence is inherently not creative. A copyright holder would argue that it's not just the silence, it's the position of it on the album, the significance of the length, the "innovativeness" of silence as an expression of art, and so forth. Frankly, since the threshold for creativity is quite low (hell, you can copyright a directory of people just because you've ordered it in a certain way), I think Apple's got a pretty good case.

Wow Compression

[jfried]

man 1.1 MB for just silence you would think nothing would compress down to almost nothing.

Realy take a look, whats hard to compress, variance.
The song is the same the entire track. so realy that could be compress quite nicely. no need stereo is silence after all. no need for a bit rate, its silence.

Frankly I am a bit disapointed in the compression.

Re:John Cage

[rune-bare-rune]

The representatives of John Cages estate appearantly thought Mike Batt infringed Cages copyright with a track on his 2002 album "Planets".

Quote:
"As my mother said when I told her, 'which part of the silence are they claiming you nicked?'. 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."

Not true

[bill_mcgonigle]

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 wondered how the various codecs handle silence. That seems like an easy optimization for the codec implementor. Here's what I did:

1. created a 10-second silence sound file in Sound Studio 44.1/16/stereo
   
2. exported it to AIFF
   
3. opened it in QuickTime player and re-saved it as AAC/128/best quality
   
4. opened that file and re-saved as AIFF
   
5. encoded that file to MP3/192/joint stereo/best quality in Audeon
   
6. opened that file in QuickTime Player and saved it to AIFF
   
7. opened that file again in Sound Studio

I zoomed all the way in on the digital waveform, maximum magnification, and scrolled through all 10 seconds. All the bits were pinned at 0.

So, while the guy is right in almost every case, he picked a really bad example to make this particular argument on. If he had burned to CD and ripped, assuming is CD-ROM drive is good he'd have pure silence in the re-ripped soundfile.

There must be something in the iTMS that's public domain that would make a better example.