Harry Potter, Armoured Car DRM and the Lawyers

The IEEE Consumer Electronics have made a transcript of my keynote address to their international conference available on their website. The talk was entitled "Harry Potter, Armoured Car DRM and the Lawyers" (or linked as "IEEE talk.doc (92.0 kBytes" on the website). It covered some of the possible implications for the consumer electronics industry of developments in intellectual property law and digital technologies. The introduction gives a flavour:

"About 5 years ago I read about the music industry suing to get Diamond Multimedia’s Rio MP3 player outlawed. I was sufficiently irritated that somebody should want to kill off a neat bit of technology that I decided to look into the situation a bit more. In the end the Rio survived the assault but only on a legal technicality in the appeal court.

So the Rio case triggered my descent into a surreal nether land of lawyers and strange ideas. And in this strange lawyer-land one of the strangest outposts is an area with the eye-glazing title of intellectual property. Intellectual property covers things like copyrights and patents.

Lawyers just don’t see the world like the rest of us. A copyright lawyer thinks nothing of suing somebody for infringing the copyright in silence. Seriously. In 2002 Mike Batt, a music producer, found himself threatened with legal action by the estate of the late John Cage, for infringing the copyright in Cage’s composition 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. If you haven’t heard of John Cage or his silence, the Musical Score reads on an otherwise blank page:

“4 minutes 33 seconds silence for any instrument or combination of instruments”

Batt had included one minutes silence in a CD by a music group called the Planets.

Leaving aside the artistic merit or otherwise of the Cage piece and the sense of someone who would fork out the £4.50 or so that the score retails at, as Batt’s mother asked him - what part of the silence did they claim you were infringing?

Sounds funny except that the case involved substantial lawyers’ fees and eventually got settled out of court for a 5 figure sum. Possibly £10s of thousands.

Following the settlement Batt decided to register the copyrights in every period of silence between 1 second and 10 minutes, except for 4m 33s. Batt now figures he’s got Cage’s estate caged in - he’s threatened to sue anyone performing Cage’s work who overruns or underruns the 4m 33s..."

and so it continues with stories of dangerous monks, people trying to cash in on J.K Rowling's success and strange anomalies created by the state of the law and the current stage of evolution of the technologies.