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So Amazing, So Illegal
Jamie gave me a nice writeup of a mashup where the writer shares some random youtube mashup video that you maybe have seen before called the Mother of all Funk Chords. It's a pretty amazing artistic achievement and probably worth at least a quick glance of your time. But the larger point should be taken seriously. He says "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who "did this" with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page. Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like."
it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Can anyone explain what the hell this means?
So you can laugh all you want to...
I don't speak for most people, but I personally can't stand mashups. I don't find anything entertaining about it, there's maybe three I've heard out of all that have been good. It falls into the same group as artists like 50 cent taking "Crazy Train" and putting it into a song as background vocals or whoever did the same to "Riders on the storm."
In short, get off my lawn!
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
nobody would ever produce music, art, or literature. Which is also why works need to be protected for a century or longer.
Theirs goes, 'ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.' Ours goes, 'ding ding ding ding dingy ding-ding.'
The future of entertainment seems so old (so old).
FFS, people, trim those goddamn YouTube links! This is all you need: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Wow that made my morning, not usually a fan of mashups but that was truly inspired, like garage band on acid. Somewhere im sure there is a lawyer about to blow a gasket trying to wrap his head around a way to even approach something like this.
No, but you need to be able to actually do things live. Mashups won't make you any money, unless, of course, you can sell them, which you can't do if they aren't IP-clean.
That's what's called a 'recording studio session'.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page. Because, this is what your new Elvis looks like
Right! Wait. What?
I write music... well, modest little piano pieces. I haven't uploaded any videos of me playing to youtube (yet), but I would be THRILLED to find that my stuff had been reworked into something like this.
Then again, I have considered issuing my tunes as open source (there's some places to do that online.)
This space available.
I thought if one is using 10secs (I'm unsure if there is a real number or duration) of any video, song, or literature it is not 'reproducing' or distributing IP or copyright, but Fair Use, and therefore not against a civil or criminal law.
You thought wrong. This is commonly thrown around /. as if it's gospel, but the fact is there's no magic number that qualifies something as fair use.
Traditionally, the fair use defense is based on four factors, one of which is the "amount" or "substantiality" of the work that's infringed. That language is as murky as it sounds. The movie 12 Monkeys got in trouble for showing less than a minute of a weird looking chair, and if things hadn't been worked out, it could have been enjoined from distribution. If you're unlucky enough to have infringed the "heart" of the work, even if it's only 5% overall, you might not have a fair use defense.
There are a number of cases that involve sampling, and the way things have gone, it seems that the current consensus is "license it, or don't sample." Hell, even if you do license, you might not be off the hook - remember the whole "Bittersweet Symphony" debacle?
It's unfortunate, but this is the current state of things.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
These mashups don't appear in a vacuum. They have to get their source content from somewhere. There will always be a market for original work, if only to feed the mashup machine. Now, I would personally find it sad if the original creators were relegated to being raw material for commercially-successful mashups, but hey, it's a free market, and if that's what the kids want...
I personally think Kitoboy's accomplishment here is more one of editing than one of actual creating. Still, an enormous amount of work went into it, if not creativity.
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"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
But the future of entertainment is not a 320x240 flash video with a "mashup" of random songs.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It's called sampling. Many artists have done it, but one you should check out is DJ Shadow. He takes old 45s, samples the smallest components and assembles them into songs. He admits that copyright laws haven't caught up with it yet, but they will someday.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Don't get me wrong, I think this kind of stuff is AWESOME. But it's not novel.
Emergency Broadcast Network was doing this kind of stuff in the early 90s, and released a record, Telecommunication Breakdown, that was all made in this style. They even wrote software to do it, and U2 had them do the ZooTV footage for one of their 1990s tours (including the alternate "Numb" video with machinery.) There are videos online. Their work was also a critique of the role of media, marketing, broadcast media, etc., so there was an extra political layer in there.
That said, I think the remixing of video samples in the same way that we remixed audio samples in the past is definitely an obvious (yet delicious) advance in the way we make music... or video... or art or whatever you want to call it.
Here's a link to get you started on EBN:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_Network
Creed.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Kutiman, the artist who did the Thu-You audiovideo compositions, did a marvelous job. As other posters have noted, these songs are generally good compositions, beyond the novelty effect.
But, seriously, there isn't that much new here. These really aren't even mash-ups, because such extensive editing has happened. The classic mash-up, Dark Side of The Moon played against The Wizard of Oz retains the originals in great part, and while their combination brings a sum that is greater than the individual parts, it would be difficult to argue that it would qualify for fair-use exception from copyright protection.
The Thru-You project deconstructs the source material into individual components and re-assembles as an entirely new whole. There is no question of copyright violation because it is clearly a derivative work. It's an exceptionally cool idea, and in this case done very well, but collaging isn't new, even within the music industry.
There are entire genres of popular music that are devoted to construction of new songs from sampled components of other songs. Perhaps the first genre where this happened with distinction was House music, starting, what, 20 years ago? Of course, the more technology advances, the more deconstructed-reconstructed the music can become, but still, someone like club master Stephane Pompougnac has been publishing his Hotel Costes line of recompositions for 10 years now.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
I thought if one is using 10secs (I'm unsure if there is a real number or duration) of any video, song, or literature it is not 'reproducing' or distributing IP or copyright, but Fair Use, and therefore not against a civil or criminal law.
Fair Use is about HOW a copyrighted work is used, not simply HOW MUCH of it is used.
If the source material is readily identifiable, and it is not clearly apparent that the re-user is engaging in a protected action like academic study, critical review, or parody, then the odds are pretty good that in the eyes of the law it will be considered a derivative work, and a copyright violation if not properly licensed.
Adding the video aspect of this work actually makes it MORE likely that the source material will be identifiable. You probably wouldn't be able to tell from 2-second audio-only snippet that a drum pattern was originally performed by Bernard Purdie, but when the audio is accompanied by the video footage of him actually playing it in one of his instructional videos, it gets a lot more identifiable.
There was a niche just crying out to be filled, eh?
If this is the future of music, then the future is bleak indeed.
I share your sentiment, but am a bit more optimistic. There will always be geek pseudo-artists with more toys than talent, but just as PhotoShop didn't kill off photography, I'm guessing that this... this... whatever it is, won't kill off actual music.
There's nothing new or illegal about this.
This is what subsampling law is explicitly for; the law even goes as far as to say how long each clip can be and still be legal (and he's way, way in the clear.) Intellectual property law explicitly allows things like this in the United States as long as they're within guidelines, and this is well within guidelines. This is how the TV news and rappers get through their day.
As far as new, bands like White Noise, James Tenney and The Beatles were doing this in the early 1960s; your choice of "The New Elvis" is particularly apropos, as this was determined legal in 1961 regarding James Tenney's Collage #1 ("Blue Suede"), made out of Elvis samples (though some would argue that there are earlier examples.)
This is what my old Elvis looked like.
But the video is freaking epic, that much is true.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
The one link in the summary isn't the only thing this guys did. This isn't a fluke, this is a true artistic talent. These mashup artists are getting better and better. Listen to the whole set then you'll be in a better position to appreciate and critique. I realize there will be those that do not like it, but if you have a shred of appreciation for music you'll have to recognize the talent. BTW track 8 is the guy explaining the project.
Track 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
Track 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAvS0pc9NIw
Track 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBfj6khrG4
Track 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JffZFRM3X6M
Track 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXulsZpu72E
Track 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i88CKr6Shn4
Track 7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vch-Z9ccHTk
Track 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz0gYbqOZXQ
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
And yet, I was out of my chair and grooving. (On your lawn).
-FL
All of the snipers are wrong here, and very used to the cynical default stance of Slashdot types, evaluating the latest new thing in terms of what was known before ...
Eventually somebody, somebody very much like this dude will use the mash-up format so prodigiously well that they will transform everything. What keeps being forgotten is that they have a library of the worlds media at their fingertips.
When that breakthrough artist happens, we will be forced to throw out the rules, and even the copyright lawyers will simply give up in amazement over the sheer awe of what has been created.
This is a format ripe for a bonafide precedent-shattering innovator. A Mozart or Picasso or pick-your-genius will turn the rules on their ass, and nothing will be the same afterward.
The rest of you can snark and quibble along until that happens (which will be soon) -- and then you will claim that you were in on it, that you expected it.