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It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.
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What I find useful when explaining people how long some very long count will take, is to tell them that 1 billion seconds lasts about 30 years, or that counting to a billion takes about 30 years[0]. Not sure if it would have helped with your guy, of course, but it generally provides some insight :) [0] I wonder about estimating that time, many numbers may take longer than a second to even pronounce.
Beholding the Big Bang, 2009, by Arthur Ganson A series of 12 pairs of reduction gears, each at a 50:1 ratio. On the left, a motor spins at a high rpm; on the right, the drive shaft is embedded into a concrete block. It will be 13.7 billion years before the final gear completes a single rotation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCA2whpMCno
What an awesome effort. However, frivolous suits will still remain especially in places where the burden of proof rests on the defendant. A lot of these suits are filled knowing that they can't win but use the machinery to drain the defendant's resources until they are forced to submit because they have no means to fight it.
If they have no means to fight it, where would the money come to pay it?
It's about fourteen kinds of ridiculous, as summarized in other threads. No rhythms, no meter, no tempo, melodies are longer than 12 notes, it's diatonic, single octave, no concept of underlying harmony, the headline is literally false, etc. Some of the copyright lawsuits are dumb and this is effective satire or performance art but that's all it is.
I don’t know what any of those words mean (octave, melody, tempo, harmony, diatonic?) Do you have a book that you would recommend to learn about these terms?
Melody is the horizontal arrangement of notes for an individual voice or instrument over time. Harmony is the vertical arrangement of notes sounding at the same time, and how those transform horizontally over time as a group. Tempo is the speed in beats per minute of the background 'pulse' of the music.
Now, asking for a music theorist to give you an algorithmic definition of how to make music with any of the above? Good luck ;)
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It's not like this absurdity was unknown to the framers of copyright. Thomas Jefferson, writing regarding patents, wrote "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society..." And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. ... but that doesn't me…
They persist because they allow some people to create extreme monetization strategies, which feeds into lobbying congress for further expansion of copyright.
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It's not like this absurdity was unknown to the framers of copyright. Thomas Jefferson, writing regarding patents, wrote "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society..." And yet, they persist (and in the modern era, proliferate) because it's generally agreed society derives benefit from paying people for their purely-idea creative work. ... but that doesn't me…
It's weird -- legal arguments aren't protected under any sort of intellectual property regime. In fact in common law jurisdictions, it's encouraged for you base your work off that of previous practitioners. I always wonder how different our intellectual property regime would be if lawyers demanded to be paid royalties for others citing cases which they had won.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/court-tells-georgia-it...
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I generally agree that society benefits from IP. I think IP is required to monitize valuable ideaS, and monitzation leads to social availability. On the personal level, I would not like it if publishers could freely print the works of new authors, or engineering solutions I spend years on could be copy and pasted. Some people prefer Creative Commons, and they are free to publish their work that way. Others need or wa…
> I generally agree that society benefits from IP. I certainly didn't mean to say that no-one agrees with it, but your personal agreement doesn't evince the general agreement that shadowgovt (an interesting username, in this context …) suggested. To be fair, neither does my skepticism provide any evidence against it.
In terms of public opinion, it would be interesting to know what studies have been done. I imagine if you would get broad support for an author copyrighting a book, and less on patenting a pre-existing genetic sequence.
As another unsubstantiated claim, I think if you sat down with the general public and the criteria for patents, they would mostly agree.
The challenge has to do with implementing them and the legal process around them.
If a crappy patent is issued to large corporation, it is incredibly expensive to challenge them.
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> The existence of laws doesn't indicate the mood of society. But if laws are proliferating and regularizing instead of standing still or being abolished, and one assumes that elected representatives are acting on the will of the people, it probably does. There's lots of controversy over how to improve copyright / patent law, but not very many people in governments in the EU, US, China, Japan, Australia, &c are talki…
Representative governments are well known for supporting powerful groups over the collective benefit of society. Just look at any of those countries tax codes and you will find a multitude of special exceptions. Patents are of limited duration because the tradeoffs of unlimited patents are so horrific. If we accept a billion dollar drug must enter the public domain, clearly copyright should also be limited just as it…
What would be the point of a patent system with unlimited duration? If we wanted that, we could just have companies not reveal their inventions in the first place
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Cage's case is more complicated and less a violation than it may sound at first. It's not 4'33" of "mathematically true silence", that is, you don't violate it per se just by having the right number of zeros in your .wav file. It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. Having a copyright on this particular piece specifically in a performance con…
>It's 4'33" of performed silence, where the performance is actually the incidental noise of the auditorium it is in. That's an incorrect way to view it actually. 4'33" copyrightable essence is actually represented by the active production of its scoring. I.e. nothing. The background sound is not what makes it copyrightable. You can go ahead and sit at a piano for the length of the composition all you want, wherever y…
That kind of thing is completely unenforceable with respect to performances, but in written musical notation, copying the specific notation pattern could be infringement. If you write "4/4, tempo 80, 91-measure rest", that's maybe violating the 4'33" copyright. If you write a score for a full band or orchestra that shows rests in each measure for each instrument, with key changes and tempo changes and such, you're just retelling the same joke in a different way.
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They persist because they allow some people to create extreme monetization strategies, which feeds into lobbying congress for further expansion of copyright.
That doesn't explain why copyright regimes similar to the US persist in countries around the world, or why countries are finding their way to treaties that standardize international copyright enforcement that look more like the US regime than other country's regimes.
Basically, America's crazy overreach forces our laws onto other nations - this is actually one thing that really frustrates me about corporate tax loopholes, that overreach could be trivially used to force better international standards for corporate VAT taxes there just isn't the political will (due to lobbying) to get it done.