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

[Geoffrey J Teale]

"John D." <john at johnsemail.eclipse.co.uk> writes:
> ....................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.

Actually.. I did know that, and I was aware of the case in question.
The Mrs. like to use this case as an example...
----%<-------

>
> 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!

Prior art is to do with applicability of patents, not copyright.  

Copyright is assigned to everything you do that is original (even your
modifications to existing "art").  What constitutes "treading" on
another persons copyright is a far fuzzier area than patent law is
_supposed_ to be.

In this case the point is not that Mike Batt put silence on a record
(every record has periods of silence) - it's the communicated intent
of that silence that Batt was said to have "lifted" from Cage. 


-- 
Geoff Teale
Cmed Technology    || Free Software Foundation
gteale at cmedltd.com || tealeg at member.fsf.org