DRM for 1'3" of Silence 637
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?"
Re:Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? They went after The Kingsmen for "Louie Louie", taking its unintelligibility as "proof" that it has nasties in it...
Precedent (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of questions to be debated here..
Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Still dumb, but I'll answer, anyway. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is just dumb. (Score:2, Interesting)
But it may be a DCMA violation. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is just dumb. (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow Compression (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Couple Issues. (Score:4, Interesting)
Converting to a non-copyprotected format is already allowed, since they let you burn iTunes to CD. And since they already allow you to convert to one format, you could argue that point that you are just converting to another for personal use.
And the tune itself is nothing but silence, which seems flawed, as there is only 1 silence by nature itself, doesnt seem logically to be copyrightable.
Myself, I stopped using iTunes, as it doesnt carry the music I want, a few only radio stations do, so I use stream rippers, which is the same as saving off a radio. Not illegal yet, but wouldnt stop lawsuits, they can use for anything.
Re:|_ (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:John Cage (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:John Cage (Score:2, Interesting)
The point of 4'33" is not so much environmental noise as the act and experience of listening.
A friend of mine who is not a John Cage fan was once dragged to a performance of 4'33", not knowing anything about Cage or the piece. A short way into it, he got fed up, stood up and berated his companion loudly, and marched out of the room. No doubt this was one of the better performances.
It's not the silence. (Score:2, Interesting)
Is it stupid? Yes. Is it illegal, most certainly.
Interpretations of "silence" (Score:2, Interesting)
One thing I find noticablly missing from this discussion is the fact that a recording of a performance of Cage's 4'33" would not, in fact, be the audio equivalent of a zero-byte file. Cage's intention, as documented here [att.net] was that there can be no such thing as listening to the total abcense of sound. A recording of a performance of 4'33" should include the ambient noises from the recording situation (made better now through improved recording techniques).
I guess that one could "perform" the performance by listening to the whole piece on a computer where the music file is 4'33" of nulls and end up listening to the ambient noise in the listening environment (my ears ringing, in my case, due to audio abuse I subjected them to in my youth), but that would probably be more of a computer-induced performance of the piece rather than an accoustic recording of another performance, which would include audience noises (i.e. people shifting in their seats, polite coughs, etc.) as well as environmental ones (i.e. air handling system cycling, wind movement in an outdoor environment, etc.)
I've been asking for years... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been asking for 5 years on
I've given up, because either there's a lot of trolls (or astro-turf'ers) from record companies, or most of the kids here are brainwashed about copyrights; they think a copyright is magically juju.
Not true (Score:5, Interesting)
So I wondered how the various codecs handle silence. That seems like an easy optimization for the codec implementor. Here's what I did:
- created a 10-second silence sound file in Sound Studio 44.1/16/stereo
- exported it to AIFF
- opened it in QuickTime player and re-saved it as AAC/128/best quality
- opened that file and re-saved as AIFF
- encoded that file to MP3/192/joint stereo/best quality in Audeon
- opened that file in QuickTime Player and saved it to AIFF
- 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.
Sonic Youth/Ciccone Youth (Score:1, Interesting)
Missing the point (Score:3, Interesting)
So it is hard to claim copyright on a recording of ambient noise, which by its nature is a "public good" (if it can be said to be any kind of good at all).
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
Silence is golden (Score:2, Interesting)
On the general issue of x minutes of silence being a stupid, head up one's own arse, pretentious load of crap idea, of course it is.
However if you think about it, the silent tracks are only a waste of money because they're so inaccurate. I'd happily pay good money for an entirely silent track that was exactly 4.123332949843985439843843... minutes long - ie where the mantissa contained a couple of MB of information (with a good beat)!