[Sussex] Sod Software Patents, did you know that.........

[John D.]

....................silence is copyrighted? That's right, Silence. As in 
the absence of all sound.

I presume that you didn't and neither did songwriter Mike Batt until the 
publishers of the composer John Cage threatened him with legal action 
for breach of copyright.

The offending track was Batt's "A Minute's Silence" in which they said 
he plagiarised Cage's 4' 3". Both featured absolutely no sound at all.

Batt said in his own defence: "I've been accused of breaching copyright 
of his silence of four minutes and 33 seconds in presenting a silence of 
my own of one minute and I claim that my silence is an original silence 
and it's not a quotation from his silence".

As amusing as it is surreal, the copyrighting of silence is indicative 
of a wider stranglehold that business has on intellectual property laws.

It is a stranglehold that many are now subverting and, indeed, 
fundamentally challenging.

-----%<-----

That's a quote from an article in todays Morning Star. Though it made me 
wonder if it would be easy to prove the "prior" thing (art/use/whatever 
it is) for silence, or whether it would indeed, be laughed out of court 
if it ever got that far!

regards

John D.