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Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

Do the authors mean that the claimant had uploaded their static noise video before 2015? Or were the videos matched after the fact?

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It doesn’t matter. You can’t copyright white noise. Unless you’re John Cage, or possibly Donald Trump.

I can't see any reason that a work comprising primarily of white noise couldn't be copyrighted.

What you can't do is stop others copying your idea (as long as they don't copy your implementation), nor stop others implementing the same thing who don't copy you.

Now, a work needs in most jurisdictions to be distinctive, but IMO the length of the work would inter alia be enough to make it distinctive, or perhaps use of a specially designed noise generator. But when you release "10 hours of noise" and I copy your idea and make "9 hours of noise" there will be no tort there.

In the US, the threshold of originality seems to be a bit higher than that. E.g. this logo was denied copyright registration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#/medi...

Refusal letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20160412165054/http://ipmall.inf...

It's not that simple though, Cage's piece -- Silence 4'44" -- I don't think was tested, but taken as a whole I'd grant it copyright. It was art that caused reflection on the nature of a "work", it was designed to be "played" by a musician with any instrument, it was 273s long presumably to reflect on whether silence could ever be absolute. I suspect it was also intended to encourage the listener to observe ambient sounds as if they had meaning. That makes it distinct as a performance piece.

That logo is, within the field of logos, indistinct, boring if you will, if you sat down 100 logo designers I bet you'd get a few that look very like it. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it but having copyright but for a logo RTM is probably a stronger right anyway.

In short I don't think just being white noise is sufficient, but I don't think it excluded a piece of itself.

Importantly, if I sit down at a piano for a few minutes, stare at the keys, and don't play, I have not performed Cage's work. There is a subtle nuance here.

Exactly, you have only performed Cage's work if you set out with the intent to play Cage's work. This obviously makes it impossible to determine if a particular performance of silence is a performance of Cage's work without reading someone's mind, but that same issue of determining intent comes up a lot in legal matters.

We have the best noise.

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