A well-considered article in calendarlive.com (Los Angeles Times):
Record producer Brian Burton knew he'd done something technically illegal when he electronically blended tracks from the Beatles' White Album and vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album into a CD called The Grey Album. But he was so excited by the mix of Fab Four riffs and Jay-Z raps that he badly wanted people to hear it. "When I was finished, it was the biggest sense of accomplishment I've had over anything," he said. So in January, the Los Angeles-based Burton, who records as DJ Danger Mouse, made a couple of thousand copies of the disc and started mailing them out. His wish to be heard has come true many times over, although not in the way he expected. On Feb. 10 the Beatles' record company, EMI Music, stopped Burton from distributing The Grey Album. That action triggered an online revolt that led tens of thousands of people to download digital copies of the CD, generating enough buzz to draw reviews from such mainstream outlets as CNN.EMI's move against Danger Mouse was a spectacular backfire in the war over what's fair when the muse runs afoul of copyright law in the Digital Age. Technology is making it easier than ever to sample and rework recordings, and to the chagrin of entertainment companies and some artists who hold copyrights, the public is showing little sympathy for their efforts to control original works. Fred E. Goldring, a Beverly Hills-based music-industry lawyer, likened EMI's response to The Grey Album to the major labels' earlier mishandling of the Napster file-sharing service. "By creating a controversy and trying to shut it down, they actually attracted more interest in it," Goldring says. "They created their own hell." He adds, "It became probably the most widely downloaded, underground indie record, without radio or TV coverage, ever. I think it's a watershed event." That's the dilemma faced by entertainment companies and other copyright holders in a sampling, file-sharing world. The law may be black and white, but among artists and audiences, the creative landscape has been remixed in shades of gray. ...
One reason artists may want to keep "White Albums" from being mashed into "Grey" ones is concern about the integrity of their works. "Taking it to extremes," says the Offspring's Holland, "what if someone took one of your records and put Adolf Hitler over it — something you don't believe in and despise? If you really think about it, if you're OK with it one way, you've got to be OK with it always. I think that's part of what free speech is in America. It'd be a bummer, though."
David Bowie, whose records are popular material among Internet music-mashers and mixers, says he reserves the right of refusal because of just such a possibility. "I would always give the artist the chance to present to me what he wishes to do," says the veteran rock star by e-mail. "I would not give permission if I felt the work to be morally or politically repugnant. I would expect to be compensated for the work used. Outside of that, I'm fairly easygoing, as long as there's some kind of communication between the artist and myself. I think that is the important part." ...
Bowie has observed parallel conflicts played out and resolved, to some degree, in the world of visual art, where appropriation of one artist's pictorial image by another has led to litigation involving such major names as Robert Rauschenberg and Helmut Newton. He's ... philosophical. "It will all slowly sort itself out into some kind of workable mess," he says, "but will continue to be a gray area for years to come. But that is life, isn't it?"
Link via volokh.com
