Politics and hip-hop are doing a mash-up

Steve Levy in Newsweek: Politics and hip-hop are doing a mash-up. Excerpt:

"Mr. Chairman," said Doyle, "he blended Elton John, Notorious B.I.G. and Destiny's Child, all in the span of 30 seconds!" Doyle asked whether what Gillis does is any different from Paul McCartney's nicking a Chuck Berry bass line in a Beatles song. "Maybe mash-ups are a transformative new art," he said. In a Congress that reflexively goes overboard on granting rights to content owners, it was a rare recognition that there may be other ways of dealing with digitally enabled creativity besides outlawing it. ...

The lunch's climactic moment came when the congressman asked how one could write a law "that would somehow square up with the 167 artists you've used and allow you to get on store shelves." Gillis said that he'd try to find a middle ground where some samples were OK because of fair-use provisions in the law and others paid for by a reasonable fee. The congressman listened, but admitted the odds were long for a Mash-Up Relief bill. "Some members don't even want to understand it," he said. "They just get a call from the industry saying, 'Bad'." On the other hand, Mike Doyle said he might catch one of Gillis's Girl Talk shows soon.