self-indulgent wankers

Seriously though, this is very silly that big money is changing hands for such b.s. "artistic" reasons. The black turtle neck and goatee set will sit around sipping their coffee discussing this as if it means anything...bottom line as Billy Preston once sang "Nuttin' from Nuttin' Leaves Nuttin'" which is what this costly court case is all about...nuttin'.

What surprises me is that Batt sells enough albums for a hundred thousand quid to be suitable composer royalties for one track.

i assume cage's estate were playing hardball because of the issue of cage's name being taken in vain

i'm a bit surprised the settlement was so large, but i don't know the ins and outs of copyright law: i suspect it may have big fuck-off sanction fines built in, to stop huge corporations playing affordable games with this kind of stuff in more mundane examples

(ie w/o genuinely threatening punishments, batt or whoever cd rip off some tiny indie band/label, who had no resources to take it to court, and then just said, "fuck it, we'll pay the fine and keep the credit")

(i'm afraid i don't believe batt's claim that his opponents had no leg to stand on: either the credit was a lie — cage had no hand — or he was attributing the idea w/o paying for it through the proper channels)

Music publisher claims copyright on silence
'Silent works' do battle
Silence Plagiarism Case Settled
Silence is costly for composer

(fine obv if you omit EITHER "i'm sure" or "dry")

heh. and AMM.

anyway, I thought the idea was that only a physically manifest work of some kind (a recording, a score) could be copyright-controlled, not a 'concept'?
Even patents don't protect 'concepts' as such - aren't they to do with manufacturing/technology techniques (thus the door to DNA patents) or with instructions/algorithms (computer s/w, and don't cryptography routines get patented?)

He *was* a pillock to use that pseudonym though - wonder what would have happened if he hadn't.....an absence of legal action which made us ponder the nature of law?

What we need here is an Art Lawyer.

''He *was* a pillock to use that pseudonym though''

yup...he had himself to blame here.

He wasn't pirating.. he was sampling. If he had done one minute of silence with a hiphop beat, it would have been legitimate.

Presumably there is a score around, in which case it would be easy to see that he'd *nicked* a quarter of it. It was using Cages name which landed him in hot water as the lawyer admitted last night on Front Row, if he'd just left it at batt he would have been ok.

I'm surprised it didn't go to court as I can imagine a jury of 12 everyman(woman) would think that Cage's publishers had a sense of humour bypass and would back Batt.

(it's in three movements: each one is labelled TACET)

cage/peters have no copyright on silence itself obv, and peters have shown no interest in the hundreds and thousands of gaps between songs on LPs since 4'33"

can conceptual artists really not register their concepts as theirs? maybe not. patents law is difft from country to country, and yes, it requires technical manifestation (someone took henry ford to court in abt 19123 saying he had registered a patent for a vehicle with wheels to travel under its own power => since that pretty much completed his suggestion, they realised that "concept" alone was quite broad, and brought in a technical spec dimension)

see think this is being nosed around as being about the copyrighting of silence cz it makes a funnier story — and peters don't mind that being part of the publicity cz it does cage no harm really — but it's actually about the misuse of an artist's name

like if i published a book but it said on the cover it was by danielle steele

... this I have to own.

QC: "M'lud, I present to the court, as defence exhibit A, the score for this piece - a score which clearly has no tadpoles on it."
His Lordship: "Case Dismissed!" (thwack of gavel on prosecutor's head)

So this 'score' - is it just a load of blank stavey things with a few of the other notations attached? Maybe MB should have got one published for his piece, one which looked just the same but had a different time signature.
Has this 'piece' ever been released on vinyl? Bet it's lovely to look at.

custos you don't have to pay royalties for humming anything anywhere unless you are playing it in public for reimbursement: which is taken care of usually in licencing of the venue

Actually I heard an interview with some guy who wrote a score that systematically takes every note and puts it next to every other note in one long (boring and pointless) piece. So any two notes you put together is stealing from his score. The whole thing was just to point out how inflexible the copyright/sampling laws are.

Mime buskers to thread

...the whole story is that he wrote the piece to be performed on the telephone & he assigned number values somehow - I don't remember exactly - this was 6 months ago - so it was the publishing of phone numbers that he was attacking. I think he tried to sue the phone company for royalties every time someone dialed a phone. Of course, it was laughed out of court, but it did point out how poorly written/executed the current laws are...

There's an album called "The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan" that is entirely silence. If you can find that you'd probably get a good idea as to what 4'33" might look like on vinyl.

a. this case is NOT about treating silence as intellectual property, it's about treating cage's name as intellectual property
b. even if a. were not true, your reductio-ad-absurdum would only be germane if everyone had to pay royalties every time they hummed something anywhere; it fails to apply because the royalties procedure for performance is completely different

mark I see/agree with what yr saying - but I think part of the problem here is that many ppl (me included) can't quite accept the idea that cage had actually *attached* his name to *anything controllable atall* - because as we have (sort of) said, you can't copyright or patent a 'concept' and the 'physical manifestation' of this work is nothing more than a titled but empty template - a framed blank canvas, a book of empty pages. (Has any legal action arisen from those equivalents? They must surely have been done by now....)

LC: I think the problem is then: If MB's argument used this, to run as 'Yes I was invoking/quoting/satirising Cage as part of a jokey idea about ridiculous art' (say) 'but actually there is *nothing* to quote *but* the idea, and he can't own that in any legal sense because it has no meaningful physical manifestation....you can't copyright/patent/own an *absence* of defined physical content' we nonetheless get into different problem areas that mark has said:
the argument that it wasn't actually about him 'nicking' the 4'33" piece, it was about him tapping off Cage's *name*, that he was leeching off the reputation/gravitas/whatever (say) of another artist with plenty of other works to his credit....it was a kind of 'name copyright' issue not a 'silence copyright' issue.

But I don't think this was explained very well in reports - all the stuff about recordings/performances/scores was misleading.
And I *still* find it quite difficult to fully accept - it feels like there must be some work being presented under a pseudonym in the first place to count as any kind of infringement: and the argument here is that there is no 'work' atall, since neither the 'original' nor the 'pastiche' exist in any legally meaningful sense......

*drowning in a hall of mirrors*

(ah - work as cultural environment/reactions to idea not as physical lump manifesting idea can't be legally defined or protected)

the context here — batt's joke — doesn't produce the effect the piece is after (which is heightened awareness of the ambient noise in a concert hall environment: the non-silence we shut out when we are listening directedly) in the way that its even routinely programmed concert-hall performance does

he actually didn't like ANY of them being recorded, though he tolerated it

the reports above don't get it, mostly, because they're over-excited by the gag element, which is, yes, a red herring: peters editions lawyers are somewhat encouraging this, aware that continued enfant terriblism gets cage's name into the world, and that the negative trade-off — continued broad public non-understanding of his basic ideas — is worth holding their noses at

batt: "i'm playing cage's silence hahaha"
peters edition: "play it properly or not at all: what you are in fact playing is just some silence of yr own devising — so take cage's name off"
batt: "you're taking the piss: this piece is w/o merit so i can say what i want"
PE: "here's how seriously we take the work of our composers"
batt: *egg on face*

i like this story actually, because cage was a brilliantly manipulative media player in some ways, and i like that his legacy still animates the legal dept whose job is to protect that legacy

batt: i'm *satirising* cage's silence with one of my own hahaha
peters: you are performing your own silence, but with his name attached thus using his name in vain, remove it.
batt: no i'm not using it in vain, it's an essential part of the satire that ppl make the connection to him. There's no slander or libel against him, and it's not possible to demonstrably infringe copyrite on 'music' which by it's own definition/score can never actually be heard, so what's the crime here?
peters: here's how seriously we take the work of our composers.
batt: let's see how seriously anyone else takes *this* one - see you in court.

I'm no fan of batt in this case (probably more on peters' side, cos of what you said above about foot-in-the-door stuff) - it's just that I just would have liked to see a bigger fight 'cos it would have been more interesting, and I feel it's such a piss-poor flag to defend that I'm not sure it really would have set any precedent.

names are intellectual property => the deed poll is a goldmine in disguise

(I know, it's more like a 'band name' scenario - but if so he should have credited 'Jack Cadge', or used some kind of synonymous pseudonym)

Although this kind of thing must have happened alot, if most past 'novelty' records of musical pastiche/satire had to do formal or under-the-counter deals with publishers/labels, it was surely because they clearly infringed property rights because they SOUNDED LIKE the something else, which just *can't* be the case here!

i imagine there's built-in contingencies for satire etc, esp. in the US land of constitutional free speech blah blah: in the early 80s, leiber and stoller made cristina withdraw her version of "is that all there is?" on ze, because it "wasn't in the spirit of the original" or some such, but if she'd changed the name a bit, and the words?

i also imagine HOWEVER the laws are drawn up, some art dickhead is going to pooch along and write/release a piece that "challenges" said law

8-o

I'm sorry mark - I'll let it lie now......

I think it may have applied to sampling .. and it may not have been law, but a judge's ruling/published opinion on a previous case..