If you use a touch-tone phone....

you could be breaching international copyright law every time you punch in a phone number....

Two Australian composers, Nigel Helyer and Jon Drummond, have copyrighted 100,000,000,000 possible telephone tone sequences. Chances are that your number is among them! So if you dial these numbers without paying them a licensing fee, you could be breaching the law.

They did it as a protest against companies which copyright DNA sequences, which are natural occurrences (not human creations). They figured that if companies can copyright DNA sequences, then they can copyright "musical" telephone tone sequences too....

Here's the link to the news story and you can also get to their web site (to license the ability to legally use your touch tone phone again) at the link below....

One person licensed his own phone number to try to stop cold callers from calling him!

Hmmm.... Will this bring rotary dial phones back into popularity? ;)

Also, with their 100,000,000,000 compositions, Helyer and Drummond claim to be the most prolific composers in the world!

- Dien Rice


Check if your phone number tone sequence has been copyrighted here....