DRM for 1'3

Found on Slashdot on Thursday, 24 February 2005
Browse Legal-Issues

In the latest entry in the battle over Digital Rights Management, a fellow has blatantly ripped off a "tune" from the iTunes Store. "Tune" is 1 minute 3 seconds of silence. To compound his crime, he has posted the tune on his web site for anyone to download. I downloaded it to iTunes, and it played just fine (but now I suppose I'm a criminal, too). I wonder what John Cage and Mike Batt would have to say about this? Will lawyers for Apple or Ciccone Youth send a C&D letter? If I were to make my own MP3 silent tune of exactly the same length and put it online, would I be infringing their copyright?

I should make a song of exactly 60 seconds of silence; whenever there will be a moment of silence (to remember some tragedy and pay last repects), people are quiet and TV stations send 60 seconds of silence, effectively violating my copyrights... What a neat business idea! If you are daring, run the Perl code below; it'll create 63 seconds of silence.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
open (WAV, ">silence.wav");
print WAV pack("H*", "524946461493A90057415645666D7420");
print WAV pack("H*", "100000000100020044AC000010B10200");
print WAV pack("H*", "0400100064617461F092A90000000000");
print WAV "\x00" x 11113196;
close (WAV);