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

[Gavin Stevens]

John & all,

On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 20:32:40 +0000
"John D." <john at johnsemail.eclipse.co.uk> wrote:

> ....................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".

I am sure that John Cage would have been disappointed. In his book
"Silence" he states that it could be possible for a performance of 4'33"
to provoke an equally silent or noisy 4'34" from the audience.

Cage viewed 4'33" as equal in stature to any of his other works
containing sound. At the time of writing 4'33", he was using strings of
numbers to determine structure; he said of 4'33" that "all the numbers
just happened to be zero".

So, although Cage took 4'33" seriously (he also believed that there was
no such thing as silence), with his impish sense of humour, he would
have been well aware of the comic side of his creation & even more
amused by the debate that the work would engender.

Just my 4'33" worth (Copyright Edition Peters [Cage's publishers]).

Gavin.