Frank Nordberg writes:
| John Chambers wrote:
| > Hey, folks, here's a wonderful new addition to the ongoing
| > issue of copyrights and the recording industry:
| >
| > http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=307449
| >
| > (Maybe we need an abc transcription of Mike Batt's "One
| > Minute's Silence" to go with the version of Cage's 4'33"
| > that's already online.)
|
| It's 4'11", John, not 4'33" !!!! ;-)
Hmmm ... I seem to see both of them in widespread use. Maybe there
are differences in performance practices?
| Anyways, if Cage's publishers actually are suing people for this, maybe
| I should remove the tune from Musica Viva...
It seems that the letter that Batt received didn't actually threaten
prosecution. It's highly likely this was all done in the "John Cage
spirit". I'd bet that they're all having a good laugh at the news
coverage. Most of the discussion I've seen of it has also been in the
spirit of the original "work".
Thus, one comment observed that the Cage estate has good ground for
complaint. By reducing Cage's work to a mere 60 seconds, Batt has
either radically abridged it, or is performing it more than four
times faster than was intended. Either is a radical modification,
without permission, of the "original" composition.
Others have pointed out that there is a long history of composers
taking some thematic material and writing "Variations on a them by
..." works. This is considered an honor, not theft. It's clear that
Batt was really honoring Cage's memory by taking the thematic
material and writing his own composition based on it. And if you
listen to recordings of both works as the composers intended, you'll
clearly hear that they are very different.
Another suggestion was that the "blank media" royalties for blank CDs
and tapes should all go to the John Cage estate, because they are
clearly unauthorized recordings of his famous work.
Yet another remarked that Cage's work was one of the catchier songs
of all time. "It keeps getting stuck in my head ..."
I've wondered if we should ask permission for an abc transcription of
Cage's work. There's a certain surrealistic fun to the thought.
I did post a reply to the topic at slashdot.org, describing a program
that I found back in the 80's, when AT&T owned the rights to the
"unix" trademark. It was the /bin/true program, which merely exits
with a successful status. This seems silly, but it's useful in
various scripting languages when the syntax requires the name of a
program but you don't actually need anything done at that point. The
traditional version of this was an empty file, which has the correct
behavior. In the Sys/V version, it wasn't empty. It consisted of a
blank line - and an AT&T copyright notice.
Now, it's obvious how this happened. But I had a bit of fun starting
some discussions by posting this program ("in its entirety") to a
number of newsgroups and mailing lists. I openly admitted that I was
intentionally violating AT&T's copyright claim, and invited AT&T's
lawyers to prosecute me. We had fun discussing whether we should be
stripping all the blank lines out of all programs, so as not to be
subject to an AT&T lawsuit. And did the copyright apply only to blank
lines in shell scripts? To all scripts? To all programming languages?
To all documents? To all printed books?
We never got an explanation from AT&T's lawyers on any of these vital
legal points. We tried really hard to get AT&T to sue us, but they
just ignored us. So the legal questions are still open.
Maybe John Cage's estate could actually instigate a lawsuit, so as to
get the courts to make a clear decision about such idiocies. I'd bet
that Cage would have approved of this.
This isn't entirely fun and games. There's a lawsuit in the works now
over the package called "Lindows". Microsoft has sued them, claiming
that it's too close to "Windows", and Microsoft owns the rights to
that word. If they win, they'll probably next sue everyone who is
using the words "Personal" and "Computer" in any product name.
OTOH, the folks who make BeOS say they're suing Microsoft, because
the Windows "Me" edition differs from "Be" by only one letter, and is
thus a clear trademark infringement.
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