Copyright Claimed on Telephone Tones

awful writes: "Two composers in Australia have copyrighted over 100,000,000,000 phone tone dialing sequences. They state in the article that they are lampooning copyright laws that protect big business rather than artists. Their website has more info and explains how they did it. You can check your number and make sure it hasn't been copyrighted by these guys. They have already recieved one offer of money - from a guy who wanted to purchase the copyright to his number so he could stop direct marketing firms from calling him." Somehow I don't think the inventors of DTMF envisioned this. Update: 10/04 14:11 GMT by M : There's a US mirror available.

prior art? :)

Jenny, Jenny who can I turn to
You give me something I can hold on to
I know you'll think I'm like the others before
Who saw your name and number on the wall
Jenny I've got your number
I need to make you mine
Jenny don't change your number
8 6 7-5 3 0 9

Re:prior art? :)

Actually, it was a real problem according to VH1's "One Hit Wonders" show. Not only did the real Jenny get bombarded with calls (yes there was a real Jenny who gave her number to one of the band, and it was 867-5309), but everyone else in every area code as well.

This absolute waste of bits known as pop culture trivia was brought to you by the letters L, O, S, E and R.

Rotary

Well, now I'll have to get a rotary cell phone so I can call home without paying royalties!

Re:Rotary

I'm afraid the DMCA will bite you on the ass for circumventing.

Turn about is fair play (pun intended)

Ooo!Ooo! I know what these guys can do for us - sue Hillary Rosen or any RIAA member when they have to call each other in order to make thier little cabal plans. Could you imagine the scowl on her *cough*lovely*cough* face?

Soko

Re:And pulse too...

I just copyrighted all the possible combinations of pulse dialing tones too... ahhahahahhah... you all owe me 0.05 cents per use... I'm rich!! I'm rich!!! ahaahhahahha

Just copyright all pulses, period. That way, for example, if someone causes a 500 Hz tone to be emitted, you'd be owed .05c * (500 Hz) = 25 cents per second. Not too bad if you ask me.

GENIUS!

These guys are brilliant. But what about the timing, or spacing between the "notes"? If I dial in a different rhythm is it the same?

That covers every phone number in existence

Assume that phone numbers have at most 11 digits (ie 1-910-xxx-xxxx). Each digit has 10 different values. So there are 10^11, or 100,000,000,000 possible 10 digit phone numbers. Does that number look familiar? If the story is correct, they have tried to copyright every single possible 11 digit phone number

A good use for copyright

I forsee the following dialouge:

Me: hello?

Tele-solicitor: Hello would you like to buy-

Me: You have just infringed on national copyright hangup now or I will seize all your assets!

Tele-solicitor: *click*

Ah finally a good use for copyright :-)

Nice idea, but won't work

Copyright is concerned with COPYING work. It does not apply if someone else independently (usually defined as "was not exposed to your work") recreates the thing in question.

So, even if they have a phone number in their melody database, you don't infringe if you dial that number, because you created the melody independently.

312-2333

The canonical phone song: "Mary had a li-tle lamb." Is that prior art or public domain?

Good thing I'm not six years old anymore and no longer so easilly amused; I'd hate to have to retain a lawyer just to determine if I could do that; especially on a six-year-old's allowance.

321-2333, not 312-2333

That's 321-2333, not 312-2333. Unfortunately, if you want to play the whole melody on the phone, there is no way to accurately represent the 5th (the 12th and 13th notes in the melody), but hitting 8 comes close since you hear (the 852Hz component of the 8 is heard as a fifth below the second, which is at 1336Hz - see the DTMF tutorial for where I got this info). Of course, its pointless for someone to waste their valuable time sitting there and trying to figure this stuff out like I just spent the last 20 minutes.

3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Mary had a little lamb
2 2 2
Little lamb
3 8 8
Little lamb
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Mary had a little lamb
3 2 2 3 2 1 1
Whose fleece was white as snow, and

3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Everywhere that Mary went
2 2 2
Mary went
3 8 8
Mary went
3 2 1 2 3 3 3
Everywhere that Mary went
3 2 2 3 2 1 8 1
Her lamb was sure to go-o-o

DH
"Fsck you dirty hippie!"

well...its a step in the (right, wrong) direction

ok, little note for some prior posters:
copyright and patent are two completely different things, with two different purposes. prior art doesn't apply to copyright. ok...now that i've gotten that out of the way...
i'm not sure if i agree with what these gentlemen have done. i don't believe that such things deserve to be 'owned' by anyone. no matter the reasoning behind their actions, and even if they are attempting to protect people from corporations and 'BIG BROTHER' i find myself disagreeing with their methods. also, i fear the day that they are threatened and bought out by a [insert entity here]that doesn't have their moral fabric. in such a case, beware.

Thats it, time to take action

So, who wants to help me encode all these 100,000,000,000 possible ringtones and put them on Morpheus?

what about...

what about sampling?

could I sample portions of seven notes of a "melody"?

Copyright does not squash other independant works

If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office, Microsoft can't sue. Likewise, if you happen to create a series of dual-tone meta frequency notes using a touch-tone phone using non-copyrighted material (a phone book, your memory, etc), then that's an independant creation. Now if a telemarketer overheard you dialing, and recorded it (made a copy), then you might have something.

IANAL (and I know the whole point was to be funny anyway).

Re:Copyright does not squash other independant wor

Actually, phone books are copyrighted. You can't legally copy lists of names and phone numbers from the phone book to make your own phone book for sale. Same for maps, which I always thought was the stupidest thing. A basic outline of the US is copyrighted. It is just a shape. A really bumpy shape. But if it is in a child's coloring book, it is copyrighted.

Re:Copyright does not squash other independant wor

Map makers used to put in little false details here and there to make sure their maps weren't being copied. A street here or there that didn't exist in real life.
I always thought that was fiendishly clever.
I wonder if they still do it - I've always suspected that Montana doesn't really exist...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

Re:Copyright does not squash other independant wor

I can attest for sure, as a cartographer, that ALL map companies do in fact still produce inaccuracies, and quite intentionally. If you actually went to the trouble of comparing street maps to an orthorectified image (a.k.a., terraserver.com) of the same area, you would see that the map practically looks made up. Map companies, if they went to the trouble of checking, could easily tell if one of their maps had been copied. By the way, if you're looking for accurate maps to copy, USGS topo maps are far more accurate than any other maps available. They are made from the aforementioned orthophotos. And they are all in the public domain. They're not always up to date, however.

Re:Copyright does not squash other independant wor

If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office.

Isn't that how it was written in the first place anyway?

Re:Copyright does not squash other independant wor

"Isn't that how it was written in the first place anyway?"

If it had been done at random by monkeys there would be fewer bugs. Now aplogise for insulting the monkeys.

Not what copyright was for.

I kind of doubt this is what the idea of copy righting was for. Copyrights along with patents were originally made to promote scientific research. Protecting one's intellectual property is the whole idea behind copy righting.

Some schmuck who starts to copy right tone sequences is totally not getting the point. He's not promoting scientific research, or protecting his intellectual property. He's just trying to make a quick $, through a loophole in the laws.

Its as if suddendly the sequence of phone digits has been invented by this guy and he has to have the copy right to your tone. This whole thing is as rediculous as the guy who claimed to own all the land outside of the solar system, and thinks he's somehow going to get away with that. If your armies/people are using/conquered something, its theirs, and no one elses.

Re:Not what copyright was for.

STEP 1: Place hand 3 inches above head and 3 inches in front of head.
STEP 2: Briskly move hand from previous position to 3 inches above head and 6 inches behind head.

Re:Not what copyright was for.

Actually US copyright law was intended for more than scientific research:

"US Constitution, Article I, Section 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

Our forefathers felt so strongly about protecting scientific research and useful arts that they granted this right before the right to free speech. That took an amendment to institute.

I agree, however, this is not what copyright was intended for and I doubt this would hold up in court. Obtaining a copyright is easy. Protecting it is more difficult.

DMCA Violations

Well this means that every online yellow/white pages directory is now in violation of the DMCA.

And while we're at it, we'll have to dispose of our phonebooks since they are now vulnerable to lawsuits of patent infringement.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to patent IP addresses.

music, not number

Ah... but they have not in fact copyrighted the
numbers. They have copyrighted the musical
representation of these numbers as DTMF tones.

Additionally, like hell numbers aren't copyrightable.
What do you think an mp3 file is? It's a very
large number. In fact EVERYTHING digital is a
number. So if you can't copyright a number, how
then is software, source code, digital music,
digital video copyrightable?

Don't Check Your Number in their Database

If a million monkeys type out the source code to MS Office, Microsoft can't sue. Likewise, if you happen to create a series of dual-tone meta frequency notes using a touch-tone phone using non-copyrighted material (a phone book, your memory, etc), then that's an independant creation. Now if a telemarketer overheard you dialing, and recorded it (made a copy), then you might have something.

According to this, I think, if I check to see if my number or somebody I know's number is in there, and it is, and then I use it I'll have gotten help from copyrighted material to dial that number. I'm infringing their copyright every time I dial a number after I see it there. Q.E.D that website is a trap to make you infringe their copyright! Don't be fooled!

Re:Don't Check Your Number in their Database

If they keep a record of every time someone tests a valid number, they could sell that list to telemarketers at a pretty good price, as the list contains verified numbers of computer-owning housholds. With a con game like that, who needs copyrights?

How to get around this: (legally)

Music doesn't only consist of tones. It also consists of durations of notes. Mozart wouldn't be mozart if you changed whole notes to eigth notes, quarters to halves, and so on. So, unless they've also patented every single note duration/ pitch variation possibility (not likely) there are at LEAST 100,000,000,000 ^ 7 melodies. Not including dotted notes, that's ^ 14. I think.

How close are they?

People don't seem to have noticed that finicky little disclaimer under the score of their telephone number:
"Notation is an approximation only of the real pitch."
(See: http://www.magnus-opus.com/number_check.html)

The Equitempered Scale (or Equal Tempered Scale, depending on who you talk to) has pretty much been the standard for musical notes for the last 200 years, although the standard for A4 was only ratified as 440Hz in 1939.

The frequencies used for DTMF tones don't exactly match notes on the Equitempered Scale. I have tabulated the differences here:

Matching against the Equitempered scale:
(Based on http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/music/e t.html#c2)
DTMF_tone Closest_Note %-error
697Hz F5, 698.46Hz +0.2095%
770Hz G5, 783.99Hz +1.8169%
852Hz G5#, 830.61Hz -2.5106%
941Hz A5#, 932.33Hz -0.9214%
1209Hz D6, 1174.6Hz -2.8453%
1336Hz E6, 1318.5Hz -1.3099%
1477Hz F6#, 1480.0Hz +0.2031%
1633Hz G6#, 1661.2Hz +1.7269%

As you can see, there are some considerable differences from a "purist" point of view.

This begs the question: Have the Magnus-Opus musicians actually copyrighted DTMF tone sequences, or just an approximation of them?

Another question worth asking: Even if the copyright holds-up, is it the end-users who are liable for infringement, or the Telco's who are on-selling the numbers as their own property?

--------
Eletus99

Microsoft Patents 1's, 0's

Whenever one of these crazy copyright/patent stories comes up I am reminded of the story Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeros [theonion.com].

Worst Slashdot Lawyers Ever!

I award this article the Worst Slashdot Lawyers Ever award. Not a single legally valid opinion is ranked above 3. Several utterly uninformed opinions are ranked at 4 or 5. Half the replies miss the point. Absolutely amazingly horrible. A record high noise/signal ratio. Wow.

Please for Gnu's sake don't whip off a letter to your Congresscritter based on this article; most posters have already looked stupid enough.

(Oh, in case you're wondering, the subject of this article is a funny-chortle, but no more. It has all the legal force of a Taliban edict in this country.)