Tomorrow, a form of digital disobedience will occur. Many sites are participating in a protest called Grey Tuesday to take a stand on musical rights. Many of you may not appreciate remixed music or hip hop, but they are incrediblly influential and beautiful as forms of musical art.
DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (“an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.
So this site, along with many others will host links to the complete album and turn our colours grey in protest. Join the fight for musical rights! Break the chains the bind us and participate in digital disobedience!
Are you going to keep the page grey after Grey Tuesday? It’s a pleasant change – and pollution does tend to be more grey than green.
We’re on complete opposite sides of the downloading/copyright issue but I must admit I really want to hear the Grey Album.
But alas, I remain true to my respect of artists and their copyrighted works. I’m a huge fan of remixes, but not when made to exploit the original works with no compensation to the author.
http://www.whatsthedownload.com/whats_the_controversy/faq/index.aspx
Well who knows what the colour of Information pollution is. The grey isn’t bad but it does lack colour, and in all fairness I am a big fan of the colour green. I’ll be turning it back to the regular colours asap.
As for the Grey Album, I really really suggest you download it. That link I provided won’t work but I’m sure you can download it from any p2p network. I listened to it last night and as much as I’m not a big fan of hip-hop, man oh man did I enjoy it. It’s very well done.
As for the morality of what we did here today, well it was basically a call out to the world that the rights and freedoms espoused in current copyright laws are being abused by the big 5 record labels. Instead of promoting creativity they are in fact stifling it by their market domination and stranglehold on the radio. This age is one of indie music and the restrictive copyright rules that the record labels have abused prevent small and independant musicians and labels from promoting their works in traditional formats. The internet is changing all the rules of communication, art, and music, it’s time that the copyright laws reflect this change in a manner that’s more beholden to individual rights and the ability for solitary artists to create new music and / or remix old music.