Guerrilla remix stirs trouble
Reuters
Sunday, March 14, 2004
NEW YORK -- Illegal and hugely popular remixes of hip hop legend Jay-Z's work have put the genre at the center of a murky battle over U.S. copyright law, experts said on Friday.
In recent months, last year's "The Black Album" by Jay-Z has prompted a slew of unauthorized remixes, meshing the rap with the music of the Beatles, Metallica and even instrumentalist Kenny G.
The remixes, described by their creators as "experiments" and acts of "civil disobedience," have drawn the ire of the music industry, which says its copyrights have been infringed.
At the center of the battle between the established music business and DJs using authorized "samples" of music to create their work is "The Grey Album" -- an innovative mix of Jay-Z's "Black Album" with the Fab Four's "White Album."
The mix prompted EMI to secure a cease and desist order against the man behind "The Grey Album," a little-known DJ called Danger Mouse.
But if EMI was hoping to squash distribution of the few thousand copies of "The Grey Album" in circulation, its actions instead made the recording the surprise hit of the year.
Owners of myriad file sharing sites recently held "Grey Tuesday," when more than 100,000 people downloaded the illegal album.
"To the extent that these (remixes) are recognizable songs or music, it is unquestionably copyright infringement," said Randy Lipsitz, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at New York-based law firm Kramer Levin.
But with many of the remixes featuring tiny snippets and heavily reworked samples from other albums, it's hard to link the music to its forbears.
Sampling advocates maintain they should be allowed use clips of music to make new art because the law allows for use of copyrighted material for criticism, parody and certain other uses like education -- called "fair use."
But not everybody agrees.
"The fair use' expression has been thrown around a great deal to justify behavior that courts have frowned on," said Judith Saffer, vice-president of the American Intellectual Property Law Association.
Producer Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, said, "every lick and snare and drum" backing Jay-Z's lyrics on his remix album was drawn from the Beatles but many listeners would hardly be able to tell where Jay-Z begins and the Beatles end.
"If it's not recognizable, who cares?" said Lipsitz.
