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Backlash as EMI Hunts Down the Grey Album
An anonymous reader writes "DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles White Album has become a online music sensation, even getting reviewed in Rolling Stone though only 3,000 CDs were ever made. Now EMI, which controls the Beatles copyright, is trying to shut the album down. They've sent cease and desist letters to Danger Mouse, a handful of record stores, and websites that have hosted the songs. Wired News is reporting on the backlash that has ensued, led by anti-music industry group Downhill Battle, who insists that the major record labels are stifling creativity."
I think that the freedom to edit and reproduce music is important but i think that it is a corny idea in the first place. But none the less I feel i must stick up for the albums right to express freedom. Long die the DMCIA
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Why don't EMI sign the guy, or at least come to some kind of arrangement to get commission from the sales?
From the reviews (and prices on eBay) the albums been getting they could certainly make a good profit.
Seems these days the first response is always intimidation rather than considering other possibilities.
Disclaimer: This isn't a troll, I'm just a fucking idiot.
PNG, plus the DEFLATE and PNG specifications and the source code for zlib and libpng
Surely this guy could have avoided all problems in the first place by getting permission. I'm sure if he'd pointed out what he was doing, he could perhaps have got himself into a lucrative deal with EMI, whereby he uses the samples, and in turn releases the album under them. I know the record industry is getting a bad press at the moment, but he didn't even ask permission.
This is not stifling creativity. If DJ Danger Mouse wants to create his own music he's perfectly entitled too. However if he does not have the permission of EMI to use the Beatles music in this manner then that's not allowed to, and reasonably so.
Musicians get a lot of money when even a small amount of their music gets sampled, this weeks number one in the UK samples U2, and the U2 artists are getting royalties for it. People pay to sample other artists and sell it on in their remixes, if this has not been done completely in this case then its unfair use and EMI are perfectly entitled to step in.
PS no doubt this'll be modded flamebait by someone who mods on opinions not content.
Under the original 14 year copyright length, the Beatles recordings would all be public domain by now, and therefore this whole thing would be in the clear. However, since the copyright timespan keeps expanding, it seems like nothing created past Steamboat Willie is ever going to hit the public domain.
So yeah, EMI is stifling creativity, but it's their right to under the present laws. It's a great case to highlight what could be if the copyright laws were different. But since they're not, it's illegal and this is gonna get shut down. If it ever is mass released, EMI will be getting more profits than the original author. Sorry, Danger Mouse, Penfold can't get you out of this one...
A record deemed illegal by a major label is not likely to be allowed to be nominated for a Grammy Award. It's the labels throwing the party there, so they just won't allow it.
But, I wonder if the other more fan-centric music award shows might nominate this as an anti-industry protest. Might be a nice way to get some headlines.
This is what's wrong with this copyright nonsense. If this was the case with other works of art we wouldn't have any of the art we enjoy today. It should not be against the law to interpret another's art as long as credit is given where credit's due.
I also reply below your current threshold.
If DJ Danger Mouse wants to create his own music he's perfectly entitled too. However if he does not have the permission of EMI to use the Beatles music in this manner then that's not allowed to, and reasonably so.
And if EMI refuses to give DJ Danger Mouse such permission, then EMI has impeded "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by preventing a work from being created. What's the constitutional goal of U.S. copyright law again?
What I don't get is where is the "creative" part in all of this. You take one album and remove the background music (in the case of Jay-Z you don't even have to do that, he did it for you), take another one and remove the lyrics. Combine.
Where on earth is there any creativity in that?
Oh wait....it won't. In fact, I wasn't even aware of this album until now, but I'll be sure to grab it off my favorite P2P client tonight, simply because you don't want me to listen to it.
Maybe EMI should take a look at how well the War on Drugs or Prohibition worked.
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True, Mr. Jackson controls copyright in the Beatles' music, but a musical work (as embodied in sheet music) and a sound recording of that musical work (as embodied in a CD) are two separate works with two separate copyrights. Mr. Jackson owns the musical works (unless he has sold them in the last two years since this story came out; EMI (one of the Big Five labels) owns the recordings.
My obligitory Google searching turned up a rather unexpected thing...a PDF version of a Princeton undergraduate thesis (warning...336K PDF) on sampling in the recording industry. It's actually been an uninteresting read thus far (quite unlike my undergraduate thesis, that is, unless you like reading about graphical interfaces for Fortran namelists).
It starts off with an interesting history of the development of folk music in this country and how new words were put on standard melodies or lyrics were appropriated into new songs. Continues on to give an overview of the history of sampling. Best quote I've seen thus far: "the current system of copyright misrepresents the creation of music, considering it a purely original act rather then an event in a cultural tradition".
The thesis goes on to propose that fair use laws should be revised and a compulsatory licensing system put in place for sampling similar in structure to current "cover" style licensing to help avoid just the kinds of lawsuits while constructing a creative artistic environment. The application of copyright law in the US is so twisted these days that perhaps a system like this is needed. We really as a country should start some serious rethinking about how old concepts should apply to the modern world.
ed
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Well, there's obviously an art to matching samples to the vocal track, and a good mash-up can be a remarkable thing.
But given all the hype, when I gave it a listen I just didn't think it was all that great.
As always, when it comes to art, mileage may vary...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Don't go crying to me the next time some company violates the GPL. You have no respect for copyright wither.
Don't like this situation? Then write to your legislators, asking for a compulsory license system for derivative works of sound recordings.
Do Bach or Mozart have control over how their music is played today? some of it makes me puke, yet I think it's OK.
there's no place like ~
"They've sent cease and desist letters to Danger Mouse, a handful of record stores, and websites that have hosted the songs"
I would have expressed my opinion about all the copyright stuff.
Then I realized the album is already available on Kazaa.
My point? No point.
Anti-music would sound like music that is not created artistically, as music should be, but that is created by the marketing department. It would sound like Britney Spears, N`Sync, and the like. And if you listen to the radio at all, you would know that they don't annihilate each other, but rather that anti-music envelopes all else, sucking formerly decent artists into its clutches and making them turn out crappy albums. Oh yeah, and since this is nothing but flame-bait, the obligatory plea for leniency: Mod me down if you want, but you know I'm right ;)
do not read this line twice.
Yes. Don't forget to seed at least 1:1
Be fair to others.
Doesn't the policy of a typical Direct Connect hub require a user to own a T1 and a Network Attached Storage unit of at least 500 GB?
They need to charge $24.00 for the "Beatles White Album". ..... uh no?
Because..........
There are the promotional expenses.... oh wait?
CDs cost alot to manufacture.... um no that's not it.
They need to recoup the investment in recording expenses
Oh yea.
They have hordes of greedy middle men depending on the corpse of the Beatles to make their Porsche payments, yeah that's it.
And needs to be rewritten. The whole point of copyright and patents, and I quote from the constituiton (article 1, section 8) is "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;"
So the constitution grants the right to congress to pass laws to promote art and science by legally giving authors/creators rights to their work. To that end we got copyrights and patents. However, the system has been severly abused and suffers from a real case of not keeping up with the times. Record companies use it to maintain absolute control which is NOT what the constitution allows.
I mean look at copyright terms. They have been extened to a term of the entire lifetime of the autor, plus 50 years. That is completely in the face of the intent of the consitution.
The whole remix thing shows another huge flaw. IT has been law that you can do your own version of other songs (called covers) for low fixed royalties. It ensures that new bands can't be extorted and locked out of using popular songs. But this doesn't apply to remixes and the record companies won't let it happen. Notice how EMI never approached DJDM or talked about licensing, no, they just wanted it stopped.
This is NOT right. The framers recognised that information is not the same as physical property and therefore needs a different, more limited set of laws. The whole intent of copyright law was to encourge people to create and share and then, after awhile, for their work to become property of the public (14 years in teh beginning).
The constitution declares that the laws relating to copyright ought to be to promote the progress of the arts, which the Grey Album is, not to allow conglomerates to retaing exclusive control over their works forever.
Just for the record, I don't think anyone at EMI is really that smart.
Just finishing up downloading the first couple of tracks, and it's actually pretty good. I'm thinking that I'll burn a couple of copies for some folks in my office who share a similar taste in music. I don't like screwing artists so I don't usually do that sort of thing, but in this case I figure I'm just screwing some rich asshole music executive. That actually makes me feel all sort of warm and fuzzy inside...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It's only "creativity" when you aren't pissing the community off, and the Linux developers would be seriously pissed off at such a combination.
Linux 2000 would be the bastard child of a hero and a whore.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I love it - mixing is really tough. Hell - beat matching on two turntables is tough. Taking two songs and putting them together is really difficult if you choose the songs for what songs they are instead of how their beats mesh. Most often when you hear two tracks mixed, they're mixed because their beats go together, not because the DJ wanted to hear those two specific songs together. The latter takes a lot more skill. DJ Danger chose to mix two records together because he wanted to hear them together - not because their beats are particularly close. He did a great job too - talented dude.
Remix Metallica's Black Album with The Beatle's White Album.
(or of course, the famous album by the great Spinal Tap - "Smell The Glove" which was released with an entirely black cover before Metallica ever released their's)
- The remaining Beatles getting money for a copyright settlement for music they wrote (whether they need it or not)
- The music label getting money for a copyright settlement for music they didn't write and wouldn't even back if it were written today
since those are the only two possibilities which could come of this situation.Personally, I'd prefer it if these were the options:
- The copyright for an album released in 1968 expired in 1996 like it was originally supposed to, making this whole issue moot to begin with
- The original artists decided to let this pass to begin with, and EMI only acts based on their requests (which both Paul and Yoko probably wouldn't let happen anyway)
- They money from the settlement goes to support musicians (preferrably independent ones, or at least EMI's marginal musicians who are getting shafted due to the way the record industry works), and not EMI's lawyers
But those aren't the options. The first two are.There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Would take a long stretch to put back IP to pre-history.
I find long stretches necessary to define the scope of the extremes so that the remainder of the argument can focus on the means, where the interesting opinions lie. So in other words, we have agreed that you feel that there exist things that should not be subject to the restriction of a copyright or patent. Next step is to determine what those things are. For instance, do you agree with legislators' beliefs that "Winnie the Pooh" should still be under copyright? Do you agree with legislators' beliefs that LZW data compression should still be under patent?
Apply this to programming: "He didn't make any new libraries or a new language, he just assembled existing functions and threw some variables in"
Mixing's a lot harder than it sounds, and a good job is really good stuff to listen to. But I bet you're one of those people who dislikes any song already performed by anyone ever, regardless of who wrote it originally.
Mod point free since 2001
I wonder if the world's greatest musician will come along some day and spend his days working at McDonald's and his nights toiling away at his craft and not sharing with anyone because he refuses to work for free for people who do not acknowledge the CAUSAL relationship between creation and intelectual property rights.
The CAUSAL relationship exists only because Congress says it does.
Were the 14+14-year copyright term of the Copyright Act of 1790 still in effect, these recordings would have already fallen into the public domain. Do you believe that copyrights and patents should last forever, that we should all be paying royalties to the estate of the caveman who invented the wheel?
After listening to this work, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed. It's basically Jay-Z with some looped hooks from the White album stomping in and out of the rhymes, but many of the Beatles samples used are lame. It's a shame because the white album is loaded with great material that could be sampled but I don't see a whole lot of thought or care in this production.
The concept is clever. The execution seems mediocre though. There's not enough diversity in the loops per track. There are a few amusing spots, such as how Danger Mouse manages to make Jay-Z come off totally gay in "Change Clothes" with a sample from George Harrison's "Piggies".
If you're a Jay-Z fan and you like the beatles, you'll dig it. If you're a Beatles fan and you're not into Jay-Z or rap, save your bandwidth. If you're into creating or producing music, you can probably do better. Nonetheless, I think it's a worthwhile attempt.
It's a declraation of the scope of power of the legislative branch. Article 1, Section 1 states "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." Remember: We don't hold that the government has unlimited power. In fact it is also held that unless something is specifically made illegal, it's legal. Hence why MDMA had to be outlawed, and wasn't illegal upon creation. Also in that is that the states have jursidiction over things the feds don't make laws on (ammendment 10 states these explicitly).
One of the things the legslative branch has power to do is to pass laws to grant authors/inventors rights to their works for a limited time. However, it's not a blanket right, it to promote progress (and implied in that distribution), not just to make corporations rich.
Also, the constituions DOES have justifications. The preamble is nothing but: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." It doesn't establish any rules or laws, it just lays out why they felt a constitution was important.
The constitution is mostly a framework for laws, not laws itself. Thus it is delibratly vague and does include justifications and limitations. There are parts where it is explicit and does specify a whole law, but that's pretty rare. It generally just specifies limits on what the government may do, and how it is to do them. Thtat way, laws themselves can be rewritten to fit the times as necessary, while stil preserving the spirit and intent of the constitution.
In that case, the only option is to mock Mr. McCartney and Ms. Ono for being so reluctant to allow sampling. The steps:
OK, I'm going to have to face that fact that I'm officially getting old. I just don't get this.
"...Downhill Battle, who insists that the major record labels are stifling creativity."
Precisely how is it creative to take other peoples' music, mix it together, and call it new, much less yours? It's hardly even creative to remix your own work. Remixing your own is either an admission you could have done better the first time, or a lazy way to create more tracks to sell for more money with less work, and isn't THAT the sort of thing people accuse the RIAAists of doing?
"Yeah, man, I'm in a band."
"What do you play?"
"The record player."
This used to be a JOKE. I saw a "music" video tonight with one guy scratching a record and four others with microphones, and nobody sang a note. That's not a song. Last week I heard a mixture of the Monkee's "I'm a Believer" and the Beatles' "Paperback Writer". It was artfully mixed in that it fit together well. But the only thing artful was engineering, there was no musical creativity involved. Yes, I think engineers can be artful and even creative with engineering. I've done it myself. But I've also created original music, and there's a difference.
If this Grey Album wants to dodge the kopyright kops, stop calling it an original work and call it a parody. That's protected under the law, and it's something I could agree with.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Let's get the facts straight here. Jay-Z made a vocal only edition, so people could mess around with it! Aka, it was intended to be messed around with. Jay-Z wanted people to remix his album.
Now, with that clear let's move on to the Beatles.
And, yes, for the Beatles... Shouldn't their material be public domain allready? Or do you think that selling 10s of millions of album doesn't establish the incentive to create, or promote creativy sufficiently?
No really. Im all for Betales being good music, but yeez, they've made enough money long time ago.
Death to all who insist on prolonged copyright!
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
If you were alive a few decades ago (And you very well might have been), you probably would have felt the same way about Andy Warhol and the great jazz improvisationalists.
So yea, you are getting old. Sorry, old man.
(Read the above in the warmest, most sympathetic tones. But you're still wrong.)