Grey Tuesday
Thinkcage has turned grey today, in support of Grey Tuesday.
Grey Tuesday is an online protest by people who support Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album and are concerned about the state of art and copyright law in the United States.
The album is an independent remix of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ The White Album. EMI, the company who claims copyrights to The Beatles’ works has sent numerous cease and desist notices to stores and websites distributing this work. Despite the critical acclaim of this important work, EMI has only shown interest in the protection of profits, further demonstrating the stifling of art in the name of financial gain. In this case we see a viably marketable work that is denied sale due to the hoarding of copyrights by the big five record companies.
Opponents of current copyright law in the U.S., arguably the most stringent in the world, have shown time and again the foundation on derivative work that many of the current copyright proponents are built upon. Disney has long been one of the biggest lobbyists of increasing the reach of copyright law as noted by Lawrence Lessig in one of his numerous keynotes:
Here’s my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don’t recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, “stole” Willie from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.”
It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years—just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they’re utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.
Disney built a media empire in the very type of culture that they, just like the big five, are now trying to destroy. Without the ability to make derivative work, Disney likely would not exist today. It is frightening to think of the art that will not exist tomorrow because it cannot be created to day.
Oh, and give The Grey Album a listen.