I forwarded this article to Siva Vaidhyanathan, and he had an
interesting comment:
<<<The only thing a court would support from the Cage peoples' claim
is that arranging silence into exactly 4 min 33 secs constitutes
"originality" under the law. The silence itself is not protectable.
So they might have a claim against a composer who issued exactly 4:33
of silence. But 4:34 is not protectable. It's a new arrangement. That
was Cage's point, after all. See his book Silence.>>>
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"...there is much opportunism in the air as people try to charge money for things that were previously free. It's a great scheme: instead of creating new goods and services, simply charge people for existing materials -- whether or not those materials are actually the stuff of culture, society, history, humanity, etc." - Manuel Labor, South to the Future