When I posted on John Cage’s 4’33” recently, I did think to myself ‘I couldn’t have written that’.

Now Friedrich Lenz has an entry discussing the issue of copyrighting silence. He concludes that the work is protected by trade mark concepts. He also gives a link to the Wikipedia entry on John Cage, which has further information on this work and on Cage’s visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University (he was disappointed to find he heard things).