Silence Is Golden, And Costs About As Much

Composer Mike Batt has agreed to pay a six figure amount to the John Gage trust for his derivative cover of Gage’s “4 33” (for 4 minutes, 33 seconds) song of silence.
Composer pays for piece of silence


Here’s the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://europe.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/index.html
Composer pays for piece of silence
Monday, September 23, 2002 Posted: 1621 GMT
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LONDON, England — A bizarre legal battle over a minute’s silence in a recorded song has ended with a six-figure out-of-court settlement.
British composer Mike Batt found himself the subject of a plagiarism action for including the song, “A One Minute Silence,” on an album for his classical rock band The Planets.
He was accused of copying it from a work by the late American composer John Cage, whose 1952 composition “4’33″” was totally silent.
On Monday, Batt settled the matter out of court by paying an undisclosed six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust.
Batt, who is best known in the UK for his links with the children’s television characters The Wombles, told the Press Association: “This has been, albeit a gentlemanly dispute, a most serious matter and I am pleased that Cage’s publishers have finally been persuaded that their case was, to say the least, optimistic.
“We are, however, making this gesture of a payment to the John Cage Trust in recognition of my own personal respect for John Cage and in recognition of his brave and sometimes outrageous approach to artistic experimentation in music.”
Batt credited “A One Minute Silence” to “Batt/Cage.”
Before the start of the court case, Batt had said: “Has the world gone mad? I’m prepared to do time rather than pay out. We are talking as much as

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