[Smt-talk] Music Plagiarism Cases

[Daniel Wolf]

The Batt case was not one of plagiarism but rather of failure to pay a  
license for work which Batt himself identified and credited Cage as an  
author.   Useful information about this is available starting here

http://johncagetrust.blogspot.com/2009/10/silence-is-golden.html

and following the links in the item.


Daniel Wolf
composer, Frankfurt




On Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:26:41 +0100, Stephen Guy Soderberg <ssod at loc.gov>  
wrote:

> The most bizarre (or is it bazaar?) case I know of was when the John
> Cage Trust sued Mike Batt formerly of the Wombies over an album track
> consisting of one minute of silence.  Batt was upfront that it was a
> tribute to Cage, but the Trust claimed plagiarism of 4'33" and sued.
> Probably his mistake was listing the authorship of the track as
> "Batt/Cage" (heh, get it?)  You all probably think I'm making this up,
> but it's easy to search the web for info on this case and a quick
> summary is here: http://www.out-law.com/page-2978.  Evidently Batt
> settled for six figures!!  Well, after all... he DID quote 25% of the
> work note-for-note. 8-P