December 13, 2005
Dean Gray Tuesday
So, today is Dean Gray Tuesday, in which various websites are hosting copies of a remixed version of Green Day's American Idiot album entitled "American Edit" -- a "mashup" with other artists' songs. This is in protest over Warner Brothers (Green Day's label) sending a Cease & Desist letter to the remixers.
I'm not a huge fan of the art of the DJs who produce these mashups, but I do appreciate and understand that they're doing something uniquely creative and interesting, if nothing else. I've downloaded "American Edit" and think it's at least a listenable compilation -- better than the few other mashups I've been exposed to.
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow casts Warners' action as censorship, which seems a little harsh to me. To my eyes they aren't "censoring" the work because they don't like the content and wish to suppress the work. They own the rights to make money from Green Day's album, and they're not getting anything from this album. I suppose that in some respect, this mashup is taking up space on people's iPods that could be used for a Warner album.
The defense offered by Doctorow is that American Edit is a non-commercial work and that Dean Gray requested no money for their work, and even suggested donations to charities that Green Day supports. Furthermore, he argues that the existence of American Edit will not hurt sales of the original album, and could in fact help it. I'll grant all that, but isn't it kind of irrelevant? Warner owns the copyright, and you need their permission to use their work.
On the other hand, I think that the mashup artists are legitimate artists and that they deserve to be able to produce their art, and even make money off it. Unfortunately, their 'instruments' are samples of other artists' songs which are subject to copyright, so there ought to be some way for this to happen without them having to go hat in hand to all the copyright owners' lawyers looking for permission. This, I imagine is the point of this whole stunt.
In some sense, all music is a 'mashup'. Imagine if the companies that make musical instruments were to 'copyright' the sounds of their products. Any musical composition would then be a mashup of a little bit of this guitar sound, this synth, that drum, etc. and those companies would be in a position to demand control over all works produced with their products.
On the other, other hand, I think Warner's C&D is a little unimaginative. What they should have done, in my sarcastic opinion, is to grab the album from americanedit.org, use their legal department to clear copyrights to all the sampled tunes, and then rush a CD to market in time for Christmas. That way they'd get paid and it'd be Dean Gray suing them.
Posted by Brent Marykuca at December 13, 2005 02:20 PM