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

[Rupert Swarbrick]

Of course, does anyone know why it was 4'33" ?

(hint: count the seconds)

Rupert

>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.
>
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>  
>