-------------------------------------------------- [EXCERPTED FROM] The confidential::Issue005::10/06/2004 -------------------------------------------------- -- Spotlight ------------------------------------- Time for your close-up :: NotCon We spent last Sunday at Imperial College, London, with a load of geeks. Not because that's how we spend most Sundays, but because Dave Green from NTK invited us to speak about mash-ups at the NotCon conference. The panel included: Lionel Vinyl: mash-up/original artist Soundhog: mash-up/original artist Wendy Seltzer: EFF lawyer and founder of Chilling Effects Will Head (chair): editor of The Confidential The discussion started with a short video, which you can find here: http://donttellyourfriends.net/s/g.php/005/005/ (Needs DivX installed, if you don't have it: http://download.divx.com/divx/DivX511.exe ) Will Head: What we saw there were two examples of mash-ups that have been adopted by the record industry. The main difference being that Richard X's was approved. Freelance Hellraiser, on the other hand, was ripped off. One way the record industry tries to stop this happening is with cease-and-desist notices. Soundhog recently received a cease- and-desist notice from the BPI. Soundhog: It's strange because I've been doing this for about three years. At one point I had about 45 [mash-up] tracks [up for download] and nothing happened. Funnily enough when I'd actually taken most of them down I got this great long email, which I didn't really understand much of anyway. The cut and thrust was we want you to take this stuff off as you're infringing our members' rights. For some people these things can work in drawing attention to themselves - the most famous case at the moment is the Grey Album. They used it to their advantage to get a lot of publicity out of it. WH: Wendy, you were actually involved with defending some of the Grey Album stuff, weren't you? Wendy Seltzer: That's right. I work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and EFF was counselling the folks at Illegal Art who were hosting the Grey Album. They received a wave of cease-and-desist letters, sent out by EMI and then by Sony, demanding that this work be taken off the net because it infringed copyrights they claimed in the Beatles works. We counselled Illegal Art with some possible responses and they decided to leave the album up. There was never any follow-up to those cease-and-desist letters, which is also a trend we see happening pretty frequently. It's pretty cheap for somebody that's got a lawyer retained to send out another cease- and-desist letter. Easy for the big company with lots of lawyers, not so easy for the little guy on the other end. Many people end up taking their works down. A lot of what Chilling Effects is for is to explain the legalese and try to help them stay online. WH: Lionel, you've recently had a case where you did a remix of a Dizzee Rascal/The Strokes track which Dizzee Rascal's label really likes. Lionel Vinyl: His American distributors really liked it and they were interested in using it as a possible version for radioplay in America. So in that case I had approval from the artist, which is nice, but it was The Strokes on the other side and they said no go on that. They tried going through the proper channels to approach their management, but it's still not going to happen. One of the key difference between what Soundhog and myself do and the Grey Album is the Grey Album was released for commercial gain whereas we're just putting MP3s up on a website. We're not making anything out of it. Does that make any kind of difference? WS: I think it should make a difference in terms of what copyright at its heart is supposed to do. Copyright is supposed to be a balance between protections for an author in order to encourage creativity and access to the public. The right place historically for that balance has been to stop at the point of commercial gain. Copyright hasn't adjusted very well to the fact that the internet and digital recording media have put the tools of distribution, creativity and derivative works into the hands of the public. The response from the major publishers is to say "We should have stronger copyright so we can prevent that", rather than recognising that people are creating new kinds of works that they shouldn't be able to control. LV: Another problem we seem to come across is even if the artist has approved it, as soon as the artist has signed a publishing deal the copyright is no longer with them. WH: There was the example of a record [by Go Home Productions] that takes Madonna's Ray of Light and mixes it with the Sex Pistols. Madonna loves this record, John Lydon loves it [but it couldn't get an official release], but was released [unofficially] by a separate label. WS: That sounds like a story that came out right in the end but only despite copyright, not because of it. So a law that's supposed to be promoting creativity - and I think that these new works are creative works, that we should be able to hear - copyright is blocking. SH: It was about a year between the track being written and it coming out, where you would think that they're going to profit from it. There's nothing the music industry likes doing more than selling back to us something that they've already sold us once. WH: The creativity of the mix - the third person's input - is that a copyrightable item? WS: I'll speak from US law because that's what I know, but you can only get copyright in a derivative if you have authorisation to use the original pieces. Someone making an unauthorised derivative doesn't get a copyright in the remix. [Question from the audience]: Where are you coming from? Are you for or against copyright? Do you just want to be able to publish an artist's work on the internet and them not have any say or payment? SH: I don't know really. I have got my own original stuff coming out and I would prefer not for everybody in the world to have a copy of it and me not get a penny for it. I'm all for protecting people's rights but, as we're saying, what we're doing we're literally doing just for interest's sake. We're not setting out to destroy things. LV: We're not trying to get any financial gain from the mixes or mash-ups that we create. The biggest problem is that we have had feedback from the artists and they like the tracks. We've had feedback in some cases from some of the companies who've approached us to do things with these tracks. But then the BPI or the copyright authorities come along and say "Well, you can't do it". So it seems the one hand is saying "Yep, that's great", while the other hand is yanking it away. We're just not clear where we stand on things. I think that's the biggest concern. WS: I'm totally in favour of copyright, but I'm in favour of a balanced copyright. A copyright that protects the rights of authors to inspire creativity and that protects the rights of the public to access copyrighted work - to access the knowledge and creativity that it contains. I think copyright law is moving away from that original impulse and I think we need to move it back. The Creative Commons licences do a good job of taking back some of what copyright is supposed to create by giving creators and authors an easy way to choose licences that say "Some Rights Reserved". It makes it very easy for an author to go to creativecommons.org and choose one of the licences and give his work away to a limited extent while keeping some portion of control. [Question from the audience]: The main point I seem to be picking up from this panel is "We want the right to be able to do this because we can, oh please, oh please, oh please", like a twelve-year-old. You're talking to very large multinational, multimillion dollar companies and you seem to be approaching it as twelve-year-olds. LV: No. My biggest gripe is the fact that a lot of these companies have approached us, or the record companies or the artist have got in touch to say "We like this, we want to do this". But there is a third party, the copyright body, stepping in and saying, "You can't". [Question from the audience]: So what are you doing in an adult way to approach the copyright companies then? LV: What we don't know, because the copyright with regards to internet distribution is such a young thing, is what we should be doing. Which is why we need people like Wendy and why we're here discussing it. WH: Also, the record industry wouldn't even be aware of this happening were it not for the internet distribution. Admittedly there is a lot of crap out there because anyone can be a mash-up artist - all they need is a PC, an acapella and an [instrumental] track. But the ones who are becoming successful and the ones who are getting approached by the record companies are the ones who are actually taking the work, reworking it and creating a new song effectively. People were doing it years ago but they were putting out whitelabel [records] on their own. As long as they only put out 500 the record industry didn't care and they turned a blind eye. SH: Go into HMV now and there are racks and racks of the damn things - and they're not all coming from people's bedrooms. They are a very strong marketing tool if approached in the right way. It seems to be it's all right for some people to do it, but if you're not on the inside you're going to have trouble. [Question from the audience]: I was a bit confused when you were saying you'd had the okay from the artists and their record companies, yet you were getting chased by some copyright organisation. And if that's the BPI, surely they act on behalf of their members, who are the record companies. LV: This is why we're equally confused. There are cases where the artist themselves has said "Yes, really like it", but it seems that the BPI or various other bodies have these standard cease-and-desist letters. We don't know if they have actually got in touch with their individual members or whether they've just gone into Google and typed 'mash-up Britney Spears' or whatever and just listed everyone that's there and done a blanket cease-and-desist order. SH: Like I was saying, when I got mine there were five tracks online. Four of them were two records put together but the fifth one was actually my own music. And I got a cease- and-desist to take down my own music. We just don't know where it stands. There seems to be this huge gap between the people that have written the stuff - and surely they are the people who should be saying whether or not we can do this or not - rather than this big void in the middle who are just firing these things off left, right and centre. >> Ends :: More info: Lionel Vinyl: http://www.elektrobank.net/ Soundhog: http://www.soundhog.org.uk/ Wendy Seltzer: http://wendy.seltzer.org/ http://www.chillingeffects.org/ Notcon: http://www.notcon04.com/ NTK: http://www.ntk.net/ -------------------------------------------------- -- Stop ------------------------------------------ Hammer time :: Information The confidential is a bootleg briefing for the mashed-up generation. Or something less wanky. The latest bootleg tunes, outings and events delivered straight to your inbox. None of that messy interweb stuff. Published Thursdays fortnightly. :: Submissions We're always on the lookout for new stuff to listen to or cool places to go. For full details on submitting stuff email hearmenow@donttellyourfriends.net *Don't*, whatever you do, email tracks to that address. It's looked after by a robot. She'll tell you how to get your stuff to us. She's nice. Really. She just doesn't do binary. We promise to listen to everything you send us. For at least a minute or so. Unless it's really shit. Don't be a stranger now. :: Legal All compositions linked to by the confidential are demo works, not commercially available, posted as an example of the mixer/remixer's production skills. Any compositions downloaded should be considered for evaluation only and deleted from your hard drive after listening. Copyright for the original material remains with the respective artist/copyright holder. The confidential does not host any of the material referenced in the newsletter. 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