Image via WikipediaHaving gotten a quick helpful response (without even asking for one!) from a Zemanta representative, and having spent some time today hearing about and thinking about copyright issues, but having little energy to write a new post, I've decided to further test Zemanta by copying the text from one of my previous posts about copyright law, and thoroughly "Zemifying" it (as they say). Let's see what happens!Reading recently about both open source computing and copyright laws got me thinking about the music industry, and companies' purported rights to songs and samples, and how we might measure what's lost or gained for whom when copyright laws put limits on creativity, speech, and commerce. It seems evident to me that the only ones who benefit from tight copyright laws (and even that "benefit" is dubious) are music companies: not the artists, not music purchasers, and certainly not the general public.
I'll take the example of The Grey Album, Danger Mouse's unauthorized mash-up of Beatles songs and Jay-Z lyrics. I'm using this example because I'm an enormous fan of the Beatles' original studio recordings, and I generally don't even have much use for covers of the songs. (I'll make exceptions for, say, The Wailing Souls' amped-up reggae interpretation of "Tomorrow Never Knows" -- they infuse it really well with their own energy; check it out! -- but listening, say, to William Shatner's berserk rendition of "Lucy in the Sky" makes my ears cry.) Anyway, my point is, I have an immense respect for the beauty and purity of the original album versions of the Beatles' songs, so I can even catch a glimmer of EMI's ostensible reasoning when they absolutely prohibit any other artist from licensing a Beatles sample. Of course, their motives are unlikely to be so aesthetic; more likely they want to keep public focus on the studio stars themselves, rather than some underground mixmasters who don't "deserve" to earn money from the guitar strummings of others, funneling it from the original artists. Seems fair enough, on the face of it.
But the example of The Grey Album shows just how inapplicable such justifications for overweening copyright laws are. First of all, in this particular case, Danger Mouse made his album freely available online, so he can't be accused of profiteering. Secondly, I submit that there's scarcely a Beatles fan alive who would merely download heavily remixed versions of their songs instead of buying The White Album, but who would have bought The White Album if only those Danger Mouse MP3s weren't available. That just makes no sense, and it shows how flimsy the financial argument is in this case. As a matter of fact, a freely available version of The Grey Album could potentially serve as excellent free advertising of Beatles songs to the Jay-Z fans who might not already own a Beatles album. Why does EMI want to limit the scope of its own product?
Perhaps they would indeed say it's about musical integrity; they wouldn't want great classic songs to be associated with sub-par or amateurish overlays. That possibility bugs me too, as I hinted above, but I trust that the classics will stand on their own, no matter who does what to certain versions of them. And why should we be prohibited from hearing the vast array of new interpretations that are possible? Listening to parts of The Grey Album for the first time this evening on YouTube I was struck by the way Danger Mouse drew out the most sinuous mini-riffs of "Long, Long, Long" and looped them into their own groovily flowing backdrop; I felt delighted to hear new possibilities within such familiar samples. Then I felt anger: why doesn't EMI want me to hear that? How could it possibly affect them one way or another if I want to listen to the fruits of various artists' combined imaginations?
Of course there's a parallel to open source computing, and the ways free access to code can open up endless possibilities in computing. I love the whole concept of boundless information sharing and its implicit possibilities; I suppose that's one of the reasons I'm becoming a librarian!
2 comments:
So Zemanta has instantly given my blog many more links and a relevant image; it's definitely a cool service. I approve! I'll even leave the little ad-link on the page to promote the service.
It's such a quick and easy service that I hate to complain at all, but a couple of small things could make it even better. First, although a lot of photos were available to post, I couldn't immediately find a way to post more than one at a time (was I missing something?). And secondly, the "preview" function in Blogger still doesn't work with Zemanta, so I can't see how the post will look onscreen before publishing it. I'll check the help site to see if there's anything I can do.
Otherwise, very nice!
Hi Elizabeth,
there is indeed no easy way to insert multiple-images into blog from Zemanta. We are working on this for our next major release in early September. It's much harder than it seems since we have to make a nice interface that works among all the different platforms that we support.
This "preview" issue of yours is indeed strange. We've been trying to reproduce this in our environment and it works for us. If you could write a bit more about how it is broken, we'd really appreciate this. If you don't want to do this in pubic, you can also send me mail - jure@zemanta.com. We really want to figure this one out as you're probably not the only person seeing this then.
Jure Cuhalev, Zemanta
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