I'm looking forward to watching the Academy Awards this weekend. My list of hopeful winners:
Best Actor-Sean Penn or Bill Murray
Best Actress-Charlize Theron
Best Supporting Actor-Tim Robbins
Best Supporting Actress-Shohreh Aghdashloo
Best Director-Peter Jackson
Best Picture-Lost in Translation
The Grey Album is a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album by DJ Danger Mouse. It is a remix without permission. In our legal system, permission is required to remix others' art (except if the work is in the public domain, and of course, nothing enters the public domain anymore). The Grey Album is therefore illegal art.
Today is Grey Tuesday -- a day set by many to protest the war waged on the Grey Album. Sites across the net are posting the Grey Album. Go here to see scads of sites engaging in this act of disobedience. Lawyers representing EMI have already started warning the sites about the legal liability they face.
Under American law, you don't need permission to make a cover album. That freedom has been assured since 1909 when Congress granted creators a compulsory right to remake music, so long as a small fee was paid. The record companies have fought hard to defend that compulsory right. As a 1967 Congressional report put it:
The record producers argued vigorously that the compulsory license system must be retained. They asserted that the record industry is a half-billion-dollar business of great economic importance in the United States and throughout the world; records today are the principal means of disseminating music, and this creates special problems, since performers need unhampered access to musical material on nondiscriminatory terms. Historically, the record producers pointed out, there were no recording rights before 1909 and the 1909 statute adopted the compulsory license as a deliberate anti-monopoly condition on the grant of these rights. They argue that the result has been an outpouring of recorded music, with the public being given lower prices, improved quality, and a greater choice.Copyright Law Revision, Committee on the Judiciary, 90th Cong. 1st, Sess., Rep. No. 83 66 (March 8, 1967) (emphasis added).
But the cover right does not cover a remix. So DJ Danger Mouse must, under the law, ask permission before he can practice his art.
Some artists think this is fair. Some don't like the idea of their work used without permission. What if Disney remixed DJ Danger Mouse into a re-release of Mickey-jailed-since-1928-Mouse, without asking or paying first?
And indeed, it is just this defense that the record companies offer first: we're just enforcing the wish of the copyright owners. This is not, they say, a record company cartel. This is about the rights of artists.
But that defense would be more credible if the record companies were to allow artists the choice to set their content free for remix at least. We've been working with Gilberto Gil to push a sampling license, under which artists could set their music free for dangerous mice and others to remix. But we've yet to find a record company that will allow their artists this freedom. Indeed, the legal department at Vivendi purported to ban us from "approaching" "their" artists.
Should the law give DJ Danger Mouse the right to remix without permission?
Should the law give DJ Danger Mouse a compulsory right to remix? That is, the right, conditioned upon his paying a small fee per sale?
But should the record companies give artists the right to choose to free their content so that artists like DJ Danger Mouse could remix without seeking permission first?
There is nothing grey about that question. It is absolutely black and white. Artists should at least have the right to free their content to mash or remix. And record companies absolutely should not stand in the way of at least that.
After doing so much to destroy their reputation in the eyes of most consumers and artists, signaling at least this would be a useful first step towards showing that the record companies care about "their" artists first.
[Lessig Blog]I was just watching a documentary on BBC2. I believe it was called Diet Junkies, though I'm almost certainly wrong. Now, I knew from reading all those anti-corporate books like Fast Food Nation and No Logo that fast food companies don't give a shit about their customers -- in fact, it's pretty fucking obvious -- but I still couldn't believe the number of people who got suckered in by these bullshit diets. [Kuro5hin.org]
Joanne sez: "The $249 iPod mini contains a $479.95 Hitachi MicroDrive. So the best deal on buying a MicroDrive is to buy a iPod mini and take it apart. You get the MicroDrive for almost 50% off and you get a free pair of headphones. You can slap an old compact flash card into the mini and keep on rocking." Link
Sean Bonner sez: "This guy took apart the mini iPod and found that it is NOT useable outside of the iPod, so buying one for the drive will prove useless." A firmware issue?
A Boing Boing reader sez: "The iPod/microdrive hack does work. Where the other poster is confused is that you can't format the microdrive in the camera. You need to mount drive on you system with a CF reader. Then format it FAT and it works fine. The drive out of the mini has a partition on it that their camera can't deal with. A full wipe on your machine solves the problem and gets you a cheap mammoth camera card. [Boing Boing]
So Mr. Big's name is John? I never would have guessed! Browse the items that were for sale at the charity event at HBO.
Now Preening on the Coffee Table: The TiVo Remote Control. Building the TiVo remote control involved large teams of industrial designers, months of work and lots of consumer testing. By Katie Hafner. [New York Times: Technology]
EE Times: Intel pushes hybrid approach for next-gen Wi-Fi. Intel Corp.'s R&D group will push for a hybrid approach to what is expected to be a broad and heated debate on next-generation Wi-Fi standards in the IEEE 802.11n group. The proposed 100 Mbit/second version of 802.11 should embrace smart antennas, wider channels and advances in error correction and power efficiency... [Tomalak's Realm]
It's Home Stupid Home, but the 'Clods' Can Read. A professor wrote an article about his small Texas hometown that led to two anonymous death threats and scores of obscene phone calls. By Barbara Novovitch. [New York Times: Education]
Low-Carb Boom Isn't Just for Dieters Anymore. A far greater number of people are now cutting out carbohydrates because of a general sense that they are unhealthy. By Kate Zernike and Marian Burros. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
Blazers Acquire Two All-Stars From Atlanta The Portland Trail Blazers have acquired former NBA All-Stars Forward Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Center Theo Ratliff as well as Guard Dan Dickau from the Atlanta Hawks in return for Forward/Center Rasheed Wallace and Guard/Forward Wesley Person.
“Since John Nash and I came here last summer, we pursued a plan that would take character into account with talent, create cap flexibility while continuing to put a competitive team on the court,” said Trail Blazers President Steve Patterson.
“The community has been very clear in their message and we are listening. As we pledged to our fans and customers back in August, we want to build a competitive team on the court and one in which the fans can also be proud of off the court. Today’s trade is a reflection of that commitment,” said Patterson.
eat.shop.portland A great reference guide for eating and shopping!
I screamed when I saw Janet Jackson's boob during the halftime show of the Super Bowl last night. Just as Justin Timberlake sang, "I'll have you naked by the end of this song," he ripped off the part of the bra that covered her right breast. I missed it, but apparently she had a nipple medallion on. It seems the whole thing was planned and even the CBS higher-ups knew about it, but changed their tune after it happened. However, MTV's story has Janet and Justin apologizing. Crazy!