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.

Other than the obvious....

[gmaestro]

There are serious problems with this claim. First of which, Cage scorned the idea that 4'33" was a "silent piece." First, there are theatrical elements of David Tudor's premiere that I'm guessing are absent from this recording. Also, 4'33" is a piece in 3 movements of random length, provided that the sum their lengths equals 4'33".

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.

Probably a mistake...

[alphaseven]

From this [calendarlive.com] L.A. Times article: Gene Caprioglio, a representative of Cage's American publisher, explained that the British organization that collects royalties had sent its standard license form to Batt. No one had sent a letter to Batt, he maintained--enraged or otherwise.

So it looks like this was just a standard form letter that was sent out because Batt jokingly credited cage as a composer.

What lawsuit?

[Durindana]

What did I miss? I saw "dispute" and letter received on behalf of, but I saw nothing that indicated a lawsuit had been filed.

Why is this assumption made? That is damned ironic, that we immediately project this concept called "lawsuit" onto any dispute, argument, disputation or disagreement.

From my reading of the (very brief) blurb, this has not and may well not end up in court. So please reserve judgment on the "legal system" until it's been called in.

There's no silence in Cage's 4'33"

[dirkmuon]

It appears that John Cage's publisher has a clueless lawyer posting letters. Cage's 4'33" isn't 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence. It is, instead. an early example of performance art in which a pianist comes onstage, sits at the instrument, and does not play for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. There is never any silence--the audience makes all sorts of noise, and there will be other noise in the room, e.g., from lights, air handling, outside traffic. One of the points of the piece, obviously, is to promote awareness of these ostensibly non-musical sounds. Another point may be to poke fun at the conventions of "classical" concerts.

I met John Cage and performed one of his pieces for him. He would have laughed at this nonsense along with the rest of us (and he would have told his publisher to stop sending foolish letters).

About the Cage composition

[spaten-optimator]

Cage's 4'33" (4 minutes, 33 seconds) was mostly an experiment into the nature of silence.

Cage actually spent a lot of time researching Zen teachings. His research into silence eventually led him to Harvard University and a visit to its Anechoic Chamber - a closed environment supposedly complete free of noise.

"While he literally expected to hear nothing, after leaving the chamber, Cage explained to a nearby engineer that he had heard two sounds in the chamber, one high, and one low. The engineer told Cage that the high sound was his nervous system in operation, and that the low sound was his blood circulating"

The point of 4'33" was to state that there is no such thing as silence. For more info, check out this paper [kalvos.org] by Andrew Schulze on the subject.

I've actually learned about 4'33"...

[Not Quite Jake]

And it's a piece intended to be performed live, the musician plays nothing but the audience is moving in their chairs, whispering about what's going on, coughing, sneezing etc. and this is the beauty of Cage's piece. It's different everytime.

Re:John Cage's 4'33"

[danox]

no

it was very much a deliberate work [azstarnet.com]

Read the article

[Fished]

It appears that the producer actually makes reference to Cage in the credits - in fact, gives him credit for the track. In that light, this would seem to be at least somewhat derivative. Still absurd, but not quite as absurd as it would seem otherwise.

Re:I'll right (sic) your copy!

[russianspy]

I have no idea why I even bother...

Have you perchance noticed the line:
memset(silence, 0, sizeof(silence));

Hmm... I wonder what it does. Set's the the memory array, pointed to by silence to zero? Up until the size of silence?

Why do people post replies before they read the original posts?

Re:John Cage and 4'33"

[natenate]

As such, this piece can never really be recorded

Cage's point was to take this even further. What he's saying is that no piece can really be recorded. It's called nondeterminism.

Re:The most ludicrous Copyright ever! "Have Fun!"

[PurpleBob]

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.

Re:Devil's Advocate

[IHateUniqueNicks]

even if Mickey Mouse became public domain

You forget, Micky Mouse IS in the public domain. Here's the legal reasoning. [asu.edu]

4'33'' was originally meant to be sold ...

[MrAtoz]

Actually, Cage's ideas about 4'33'' changed several times during his life. Of particular interest here is that, when he first thought of the idea of a silent piece in 1948, his intent was to sell it to Muzak (so he could get some peace & quiet in elevators, I suppose). So the notion of collecting royalties on it now just brings the piece back to its beginning ...

Lennon's Nutopian International Anthem

[DWIM]

Track 3 on the Mind Games album. 3 seconds long, 3 seconds of silence. The album was released November 1973.

Re:25khz I rather doubt it.

[esper]

20kHz is the average upper limit of human hearing. Some of us are able to hear higher frequencies, allowing us to do stupid party tricks like complaining about TVs that are left on with no video signal feeding them. But I digress.

One day in a physics lab during my freshman year of college, we were doing audio interference experiments and, after finishing early, I started playing with the audio oscillator I had been assigned. According to this test (which was, admittedly, likely to be somewhat less than 100% accurate) I was capable of hearing sounds up to about 23.5kHz and could sense vibrations up to around 25kHz, although these were perceived as something more like a pressure on my head rather than as sound.

So I have no difficulty in believing that the earlier poster was at one point able to hear up to 25kHz.

Re:Supreme Court opinion on this

[Animats]

That's the decision, incidentally, in which the Court ruled that telephone books are not copyrightable. The presentation and layout may be copyrighted, but if you scan them in and extract the raw data, that's OK. The basic idea is that copyright protects creativity, not effort.

There have been a few other cases like this. Another is Bridgeman vs. Corel, in which a court ruled that taking a 2D picture of an artwork for which copyright has expired does not create a copyrightable image. No originality. So Corel's clip-art disk, made from museum slides of old paintings, was OK.