Darknet

Remix culture video contest

Owen Gallagher, Creative Director of TotalRecut.com, passes along word of a remix contest that I'll be a judge in:

TotalRecut.com is hosting a Video Remix Challenge over the next two months and we want you to create a short video using the theme: 'What is Remix Culture?' You can you use any footage you can find, including Public Domain and Creative Commons work, but the finished video cannot be longer than 3 minutes or shorter than 30 seconds long.

The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with video editing and conversion software, a digital camcorder, a digital media player, as well as Special Edition Total Recut T-Shirts, books, DVDs and CDs. We have an amazing lineup of judges for the contest including Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Kembrew McLeod, Pat Aufderheide, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. You can find out more information at: http://www.totalrecut.com/contest1.php.

Entries will be accepted from May 1 until June 2 when public voting will begin. The best 10 videos at the end of the 2-week voting period will be put forward into the final, where they will be voted on by the judging panel. The winners will be announced around the 1st of July. So get busy making those videos!

Here's a link to the YouTube promotional video for the contest.

DIY random CD cover

   

Wow, I love these fake CD/album covers by mikelietz on Flickr. He writes here:

To make your own random CD cover, follow these steps:

1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of the band.

2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the album title.

3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, license permitting, is the album cover. [To save time, get one from here.]

4. The finished product belongs in the  CD cover meme pool.

I was hoping there was a ready-made mashup tool that added album titles to a photo -- and I'm sure there are some Web 2.0 sites out there that let you do this -- but for the most part looks like you have to do the mashing up yourself.

Here's the Flickr pool, with 790 photos. And here's mine:

Cross-posted to Social Media.

On the Richter Scales' "Here comes another bubble" video dispute

Lane Hartwell: My statement regarding the Richter Scales “Here comes another bubble” video dispute.

Dave Winer: A flash conference on fair use?

New mashups site

Here's a cool new site: Totalrecut.com. Check out the Disney mashup of Copyright law on the front page.

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.

Sun's new mashup site

Sun Microsystems today launched a site called The Big Mashup: How the network is changing entertainment and news gathering in the Participation Age. Particpants include Andrew Baron, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky and others.

Mash-up maps

Washington Post: Start-Ups Try to Plot A Complete Picture. 'Mash-Ups' Add Data to Online Maps

Son of Beatles producer mashes up the Beatles

Associated Press via San Jose Mercury News: Son of Beatles producer makes a loving mash-up. Excerpt:

It's the Beatles as they never even imagined themselves.

The Beatles' ``Love'' album, released this week, is a thorough reinterpretation of their work, with familiar sounds in unfamiliar places, primarily created by the son of the man who was in the control room for virtually all their recording sessions.

It's a mash-up, even though Giles Martin said he hates the word. John Lennon sings ``he's a real nowhere man'' in the background of the instrumental track to ``Blue Jay Way.'' The keyboard of ``Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite'' dissolves into the plodding guitar of ``I Want You (She's So Heavy).''

``Strawberry Fields Forever'' builds from Lennon's acoustic demo into a psychedelic swirl of sounds that incorporates bits of ``Hello Goodbye,'' ``Baby You're a Rich Man,'' ``Penny Lane'' and ``Piggies.''

The project was created for a collaboration with Cirque du Soleil and has the endorsement of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the widows of Lennon and George Harrison, Martin said.

``I had fresh ears -- if you can have fresh ears to the Beatles -- and my job was to make things different,'' said Martin, who was born in 1969 as the band was breaking up.

The rules were simple: Beatles tracks only, no electronic distortion of what they recorded, and no newly recorded music. The single exception was a string arrangement, written by original Beatles producer George Martin, to accompany an acoustic version of Harrison's ``While My Guitar Gently Weeps.'' ...

As a producer, Martin said the term ``mash-up'' implies two things rammed together. While it can be good, it doesn't stand up to repeated listenings, which he believes is what sets ``Love'' apart.

Cuts.com: Mash up a Hollywood video

Someone just alerted me to Cuts.com, an interesting startup that demoed at DemoFall:

Product Description

Cuts lets everyday people edit, share and watch personalized versions of copyrighted video. Parents can take control by removing inappropriate or scary scenes. Friends can insert and share commentary, re-arrange scenes or add to the videos they own. By creating Cutlists, which are virtual edits separated from the content itself, users can share their creations over the Internet. Now everyone can watch their videos their way, legally.

Market Opportunity

All over the world people are taking control of their viewing experiences: TVGuardian has sold 7 million devices, 4 million people viewed Brokeback Mountain satires on YouTube, The Shining trailer re-cut was the most popular blog link for two weeks. Cuts enables these uses and much more, legally.

Demo Says

Film directors everywhere will cringe at Cuts, but parents, educators and digital media geeks are going to love it. By enabling individuals to create their own film edits and sequencing, Cuts lets you watch a film the way you wish it had been made (for example, much shorter, for parents forced to endure any barney video for the 356th time), add commentary to elucidate key scenes, or simply watch that favorite moment again and again and again. Cuts puts film fans in control of their movie-watching experience.

Yahoo! Mail opened to mash-up makers

ITWire: The world's number one internet company Yahoo has opened up the code to its popular web-based email system Yahoo! Mail to enable outside developers to create web-based applications based on the platform.

Of darknets and mash-ups

I gave a talk Monday night at Malmö University in Sweden — the Shift Lecture series, it's called — on darknets and mashup culture. I expected perhaps 10 or 20 people to show up at the library along Malmö's scenic waterfront, but more than 100 turned out.

My talk and slide show explored the shift in media culture, darknets, Hollywood, the entertainment industry's business models, file sharing and even Sweden's Pirate Party (piratepartiet), which garnered 35,000 votes, though no seats, in national elections a week ago. One member of the Pirate Party was in the crowd, and he came up afterward and let me know about the Pirate Party's new U.S. outpost.

Also showed four videos of mash-ups, all of them illegal or infringing. Didn't encounter any pushback from the audience, which seemed inclined to allow this kind of experimentation, at least for noncommercial purposes. Afterward, I did an interview with Swedish Radio.

I also took a bunch of photos, but can't seem to get them off of my camera phone at the moment.

Creative Commons for news?

Amy Gahran at E-Media Tibits:

At this year's LinuxWorld conference, Stanford Univ. law professor Lawrence Lessig (one of the founders of Creative Commons) gave a keynote speech where he discussed one of his favorite themes: "free culture."

You can download or stream the audio of Lessig's talk from PodTech. Also, his book Free Culture is available for free online.

Lessig discusses the difference between "read-only" and "read/write" culture, where anyone can take images, words, and sounds from the culture around us and remix them to create new, unique, authentic expression.

"This is the literacy of the 21st century," Lessig declared. He also claims that read/write culture can peacefully coexist alongside read-only culture (as controlled by copyright law). Neither approach need displace the other. ...

I wonder: is there some way that news organizations might beneficially leverage tools such as Creative Commons licensing to allow and encourage derivative works from news content?

Art and marketing all mashed up

Washington Post, from earlier this month: Art and Marketing All Mashed Up. Video Edits Gain Popularity Online, and Firms Are Noticing.

'We Are Not Alone'

video mashup: ben nisetar
home: they-live.com
spoken word: david icke
music: martin noakes

We Are Not Alone, a new photo/video mashup (in Flash) by Benn Nisetar, using onetruemedia’s online montage tool. Terrific!

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

Senator spoofed for description of Internet

San Jose Mercury News: Senator spoofed for lapse in lingo. Excerpt:

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is enduring no end of ridicule in the blogosphere for his recent explanation, in a Commerce Committee debate, of how the Internet works.

Snorting loudest are bloggers who are angry at Stevens for not adding a non-discrimination provision -- known as ``net neutrality'' -- to the communications bill that he wants Congress to pass this year.

``The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes,'' Stevens said during a June 28 committee session.

``And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material.''

At another point in his 11-minute discourse, he said he'd seen these delays firsthand: ``I just the other day got -- an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.''

Internet pundits greeted his explanations with a non-stop derision on sites such as boingboing, Daily Kos, MySpace and YouTube. ...

At the heart of the barbs is Stevens' stance on net neutrality. It's a polarizing, complicated issue that has, on one side, the corporations that bring the Internet into homes and offices -- such as AT&T, BellSouth and cable companies -- and on the other, companies that provide the services that people use on the Internet -- most prominently Google, craigslist, eBay and Microsoft.

The content providers say that without new laws, the telephone and cable companies will become self-serving Internet gatekeepers, letting traffic flow quickly to vendors with whom they have financial affiliations and slowly to their competitors.

Senator Ted Stevens vs. The Ninja - Net neutrality mashup

John Aprigliano of the Diabeticfeed podcast has mashed up the instrumental version of Derek Miller's "Tell Me About Gnomedex Theme," Senator Ted Stevens' infamous "the Internet is a series of tubes" rant, and Ask a Ninja's similarly cogent explanation of the topic. Check out the mp3. And Digg it.

What youth culture wants

CBS News: The 'Mash Up' Culture. Teens Use Technology To Mix, Match And Create Their Spheres.

According to the Horatio Alger Association's State of our Nation's Youth 2005 report, the percentage of Internet-using teens that downloaded music for free dropped from 44 percent to 40 percent between 2004 and 2005, while the percentage that paid to download rose from 17 percent to 24 percent in the same time period.

Video mash-ups at Canadian art fest

Toronto Star: Dice and splice artists step up to throw-down.

While terms like remix and mash-up are more readily used to describe the sampling and cut-and-paste movement in the audio world, video artists are increasingly slicing, dicing and reconstituting to create something new.

Today's Videodrome 2 event at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art further busts open the frame. Four groups will perform a live throw-down of their audio-visual art, a real-time twist on the typically taped displays.

"The concept is a video battle, which is like the traditional deejay battle or emcee battle, with people who make video and audio at the same time. It's four crews squaring off against each other in a tournament and basically they're trying to outdo each other by showing a better video," says Jubal Brown, one of the five members of Toronto contingent Famefame, and an organizer of the event.

"Most of them will be doing some live mixing, with prepared DVDs in most cases, and they're playing those with fairly new technologies that allow you to scratch and manipulate the DVD as you would a record."

It's the type of event that tries to put the "arty" in party.

Dubbed an International Hardcore Video Tournament, master of ceremonies will be video collage artist Pinky Beckles, of TV Carnage. Renowned local deejay and party thrower Will Munro will also spin.

Despite the current craze of personal broadcasting with people uploading found and created video to sites like Youtube.com and Google Video, fellow Famefame founder Tasman Richardson says this event will feature art that's much more complicated.

"Remixing video with a rudimentary beat is one thing, but breaking things down to one-30th of a second and reconstructing two-dimensional compositions while integrating harmonies, melodies and really complicated tempos, sub-rhythms and breaks, it's almost impossible to do live," says Richardson. "I mean, we've scoured the world for these folks and the people that we're going to have here ... are the only ones who we could find that are even remotely close to what we were looking for."

The contenders:

Famefame: While this local collective is a five-person squad, usually only one performs at a time. The group pre-records DVDs ("Right now, we're all editing furiously to try and make as much material as possible," says Richardson) and plays them with the program Final Scratch Pro. The group attempts to use more harmony and melody than their counterparts.

Madame Chau: Coming from New York, Richardson says Chau comes from the "really underground" scene and is influenced by "breakcore" and "gabber" (really speedy techno) music. "I'm sure he'll have aggressive visuals that are really heavily layered. The audio will be more related to noise and repetitions. Less harmony than us and more brute force," he says. Adds Brown: "He was thinking of bringing his hacked version of Sony PlayStation that he plays live. It's a rig that he wears on his body and controls while he interacts with the audience."

V-Atak: From Paris, this group actually holds the Videodrome title (yes, there is one), and their approach is more focused on creating and mixing live elements. "They do rhythmic work and they're still trying to get this breakthrough live element, which is difficult. It's not as fast or as complicated as some others, but that's sort of the give-and-take," says Richardson. "They believe that having the ability to push the button and create images right in front of people adds to the excitement."

Eclectic Method: Considered to be some of the best video mash-up artists in the world, this London-based group works with rock videos in an extremely processed way. "It's quite overwhelming and there is a high rate of turnover. Like 30 seconds of one clip, 10 seconds of another. It moves really fast, and it's all mixed into a perfectly danceable party mix," says Brown.

Richardson says that he's been trying to do this type of work for a decade and thanks to eases in technology, it just gets more sophisticated, as does the audience reaction to an event that can be jarring with its juxtaposition of images and sounds.

"I call it the post-television-era existence," he says. "Video was a consumer thing almost immediately and it's taken a really long time for people to realize that anything can be recorded and therefore everything will be recorded.... It's only now people are starting to realize this intuitively. We're all raised on this television language before we can even speak, so now people are choosing to remix that material. And people respond to it instantly, because they speak the language too."

Mash-ups showcase

I've been nonstop crazy busy for the past two weeks, so only have time to get to this now. One of the coolest events at the South by Southwest Music Festival came on March 15 during a mash-up event sponsored by Outhink and IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. (By the way, regular readers know that I don't subscribe to the common blogger propensity for ignoring any event older than 24 or 48 hours old. Such is the case here.)

Outhink worked with IODA to persuade five independent record labels to make a music track available for videobloggers to remix into a video mash-up. That is, the song would serve as the soundtrack for a collage of images and video drawn from the public domain and from original footage.

If you're a band, what could be better than having vloggers create free music videos for you? It's a hell of a lot cheaper — and often more interesting — than the six-figure productions charged by professional music video directors.

This, I predict, is going to become a huge phenomenon in the years ahead: musicians and video artisans working in tandem.

Here's the rest of the story: Once we obtained permission from the labels to use their music, I asked a half-dozen leading figures in the videoblogging world to create a mashup. Here are the results, from Steve Garfield, Ryanne Hodson, Josh Leo, Annaliese Rittershaus and myself. Three vloggers chose the same track — all of them are pretty cool.

Track: The Organization (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Josh Leo

Track: The Organization (play video, 640x480) (play video, 320x240 version)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Steve Garfield

Track: The Organization (play video)
Album: Get Firm
Artist: The Herms
Label: Jackpine Social Club
Mashup producer: Annaliese Rittershaus

Track: Texas_Snow (play video) (mp3)
Album: The Quiet Vibrationland
Artist: Oranger
Label: Amazing Grease
Mashup producer: Ryanne Hodson

Track: Return of the Champion (play video here or here | Ourmedia page) (mp3)
Label: Survival Guide For The End Of Time
Artist: Heavyweight Dub Champion
Label: Champion Nation
Mashup producer: JD Lasica

Michael Verdi also shot a lot of video footage (scroll down) of the podcast interviews conducted at the event.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

The new breed of Web mash-up

Katie Hafner in the New York Times: Wary of a New Web Idea That Rings Old. Excerpt:

Web mash-ups, which have proliferated in recent months, can be made up of two or more sets of data. They are often based on Google Maps or Google Earth, then overlaid, or tagged, with information on the location of just about anything.

Dozens of such stitched-together maps have sprung up on Platial since the site first went up in December. They include a walking map of taco stands in Oakland, Calif.; a tour of cycling spots in Toronto; a guide to famous film locations; and a map of public biodiesel pumps across the nation.

The key to Platial, Ms. Eisnor said, is that it offers "a platform that lets anyone make their own mash-ups," which creates "this social atlas where people can document locations that are important to them." More and more, she said, she is noticing that new Platial users will add 50 to 100 places to the site's existing maps in the first week they discover the site, and often they create their own maps. ...

Do-it-yourself video mashups

The Associated Press has this terrific article outling the state of visual remixes: Do-it-yourself mashups like a digital blender.

Tom Cruise zaps Oprah Winfrey with the Dark Side of the Force. Bert and Ernie pose as poster boys for gay cowboy love. Sweet, white-haired Mary Worth belts out Black Eyed Peas song lyrics: ``I'm a make, make, make you scream!''

Entertainment from a parallel universe?

Not exactly.

They're alterations of familiar pictures and videos posted on the Web. Artists, often anonymous, snag the images then mix them in a digital blender to create something new -- usually something dripping with irony. The Cruise clip from ``The Oprah Winfrey Show'' was married with ``Star Wars'' effects, Muppet heads were grafted on to the ``Brokeback Mountain'' poster and word balloons from comic strip's Mary Worth were scrubbed and funked up.

They're often called mashups, just like the do-it-yourself songs that combine tracks from separate tunes. And like song mashups, visual remixes are spreading like viruses around Web sites and blogs, those increasingly popular personal online journals.

With software making it easy to slice, dice and subvert everything from movie clips to comic strips, the unauthorized visual remixes could become a significant movement in digital art, a copyright lawyer's worst nightmare or both.

``We're at the start of an age when anyone can produce a short/joke/remix/recut and get it online and out to millions, all within the space of one day sitting at their personal computer,'' said Demis Lyall-Wilson, who created a popular mashup movie trailer recasting ``Sleepless in Seattle'' as a stalker film.

``You just have to submit your link to the right blogs.''

But media executives are not amused. Entertainment companies zealously fight to protect their characters' images -- be it Disney lobbying to extend copyright protections or DC Comics sending a cease-and-desist letter to a New York art dealer last year for showing paintings that cast Batman and Robin as gay.

The ease by which any song, image or film can be pirated in the digital era has not only raised that anxiety, but touched off an intellectual property rights debate that is still playing out in boardrooms and courthouses.

Courts have yet to fully grapple with the legality of visual remixes. Although Batman and ``The Shining'' have copyright protections, the law carves out so-called fair use exceptions for certain reviews or parodies of copyrighted work.

Whether a mashup is fair use depends on a number of factors, including how much gets used and whether the new work is used commercially. Ian C. Ballon, a California-based intellectual property attorney who has represented media companies, said that while legality can only be determined on a case-by-case basis, mashup artists face a real risk of liability.

Like disc jockeys pairing the Beatles with Jay-Z or The Strokes with Christina Aguilera, visual mashup artists exploit odd juxtapositions. An old ``Superfriends'' cartoon is synced with dialogue from the cult slacker movie ``Office Space.'' Scenes from ``The Shining'' are cleverly cut and overdubbed with feel-good narration to make it look like a trailer for a sappy family movie. And is there anything less likely than Mary Worth reciting the lyrics to ``My Humps'' over coffee?

``It was just sort of the absurdity of marrying this very serious serial strip with that song, which is so ridiculous,'' said creator Sue Trowbridge.

Tools of the craft are software like Adobe Systems' Photoshop and Apple Computer's Final Cut Pro instead of paint or clay, but fans say it's still art.

Joey deVilla, a Toronto-based blogger, calls mashups a form of folk art that follows the age-old creative tradition of borrowing from existing works to create something new. Think of Shakespeare adapting old stories with his immortal prose or Roy Lichtenstein taking a page from comic book illustrators for pop art paintings.

``It is the digital-media equivalent of collage, except instead of pasting together pieces of other people's existing work you're pasting together other people's films and music, `` Lyall-Wilson said in an e-mail.

Jason Schultz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation contends that there should be legal protection for mashups such as ``The Shining.'' After all, it's a non-commercial parody that poses no threat to the movie since no one is going to watch the trailer instead of renting the movie.

Copyright Criminals Remix Contest deadline extended

Attention all producers, DJs, and remixers: the Copyright Criminals Remix Contest over at ccMixter has been extended by two weeks, to March 14. New vocal samples from rapper Chuck D (of Public Enemy) and pioneering funk musician George Clinton (of Parliament-Funkadelic) have been made available for use in the competition.

Is that cool or what?

Cease and desist for bootleg site

Sounds like Get Your Bootleg On has received a cease and desist order, from what I can make of this posting in Dutch at the Mashculture site.

Dean Gray Tuesday

I'm a huge fan of Green Day, so I was disappointed to learn of the cease-and-desist order that the band's record label, Warner, sent to the creators of the inspired noncommercial, Internet-only mash-up album American Edit.

The result is another Gray Tuesday (after the artists' alias, Dean Gray), this one set for Dec. 13.

Read about it here, and on BoingBoing via Ponderance.

Cory Doctorow nails it:

As I wrote earlier this week, fighting mashups has nothing to do with reducing "piracy." No one who listens to American Edit will shrug her shoulders and say, "Well, heck, now that I've heard that, who needs to buy the Green Day album?" Censoring this art is tantamount to saying, "This music must go because it displeases us."

Welcome to Remix Culture

Redhat.com looks at Remix Culture, specifically the public domain films available through the Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives. The citizens media site Wearethemedia.com has declared November "remix month," so I'll be following its reports with interest.

Ourmedia.org plans to do far more than make content available for remixing. So stay tuned for word about our plans for a Remix Central in the coming months.

Mash-up culture

The Urban Testing Ground blog points to a two-part video series on the mash-up movement (called bootleg culture in the UK) -- using the recombinant DNA of two separate song tracks to create a startling new sound. As one of the speakers says, "It's the first cultural movement of the Internet age."

It's also illegal under copyright law.

Here's part one, a 4-minute QuickTime video.

Mix and mash-up

The San Jose Merc takes a look at the Bay Area's red-hot mash-up music scene. The article also offers this list:

Mash-up websites

Getyourbootlegon.com The mother of all mash-ups Web sites where the international mash-up community distributes, chats and meets

Culturedeluxe: For bootleg charts based on Web site visitor votes

Mashupradio: For mash-up podcasts and popular downloads

Gohomeproductions: Based in the United Kingdom, motherland of the mash-up, these DJs created the now famous "Ray of Gob'' Sex Pistols vs. Madonna mash-up.

As for video mash-ups, take a look at the lead video on Ourmedia right now.

The Mercury News also published this list of Bay Area mash-up DJs:

DJ John Liechty of Campbell. Spins at Bootie SF mash-up parties. Signature style: complex party mixes blending multiple parts. www.djjohn.net.

DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D (a.k.a. Adrian and Deirdre Roberts, at www.rebeldjs.com). Founders of San Francisco's Bootie monthly mash-up dance club parties: www.bootiesf.com. Adrian's live mash-ups band performs at Bootie and around the Bay Area: www.smashupderby.com.

DJ Party Ben (a.k.a. Ben Gill) of Live 105's (KITS-FM 105.3) Sixx Mixx, 6-6:30 p.m. Fridays. http://partyben.com.

DJ Yuma Tripp of Santa Cruz. Resident DJ of monthly mash-up parties at Blue Lagoon. www.bass211.com.

DJ Matt Hite of San Francisco. Writes a comprehensive insider blog on mash-up DJ news, production and culture. www.beatmixed.com.

DJ Earworm of San Francisco. Recently deejayed parties at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami. His tracks appear on popular bootleg compilation ``The Best Mash-ups in the World ever are from San Francisco.'' www.djearworm.com.

DJ Mei Lwun of San Francisco. Spins at Frisson, 244 Jackson St., San Francisco, (415) 956-3004; and Club Glo, 396 S. First St., San Jose, (408) 995-6414. www.mei-lwun.com.

Birth of a protest song

NY Times: Art Born of Outrage in the Internet Age.

IN the 18th century, songwriters responded to current events by writing new lyrics to existing melodies. "Benjamin Franklin used to write broadside ballads every time a disaster struck," said Elijah Wald, a music historian, and sell the printed lyrics in the street that afternoon.

This tradition of responding culturally to terrible events had almost been forgotten, Mr. Wald said, but in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it may be making a comeback, with the obvious difference that, where Franklin would have sold a few song sheets to his fellow Philadelphians, the Internet allows artists today to reach the whole world.

For example, an unlicensed rap song describing the frustration of African-American evacuees has been made available free on the Internet. The song, "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," by the Houston duo called the Legendary K.O., vividly recounts the plight of those who endured the hurricane, occasionally using crude language in the process. It has already been downloaded by as many as a half-million people. The videos have been seen by thousands. ...

In New Brunswick, N.J., Marquise Lee, a freelance video producer, heard the song and thought it called for a video. He downloaded scenes of African-Americans in New Orleans, intercutting them with images of President Bush and unrelated scenes from a Kanye West video.

We discussed these sort of mash-ups yesterday at the Webzine2005 conference. "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People" is up at Ourmedia here.

Mashing up Hurricane Katrina

From Saturday's NY Times: Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded.

Here's the video. Excerpt:

Last month, Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was serving both as a protest song against the war in Iraq and as a patriotic ballad. It was (and still is) one of the most requested music videos on MTV. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is a song about the devastation that followed Katrina. ...

Today, it's the same old song with a different meaning. Two weeks ago, Karmagrrrl, a blogger also known as Zadi, paired the Green Day ballad with television news coverage of Katrina and posted it at her Web site, smashface.com/vlog. Her video fits the lyrics like a glove.

Karmagrrrl's video begins with a view of green trees out the window of a bus. "Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends." On the floor of the bus, you see a pair of red sneakers toeing the headline "HELP US" on a folded copy of The New York Post from Sept. 1. The picture in the newspaper shows a pair of feet in cardboard sandals.

From that point on, "Wake Me Up" is set to images of Katrina seen on MSNBC, CNN and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." As the rain rages on MSNBC, the song swells: "Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars." A streetlight falls onto the wet street: "Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are." Videotape of corpses carried on stretchers goes with this lyric: "As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost." It's almost too perfect. ...

"I want the folks there on the Gulf Coast to know that the federal government is prepared to help you," [President Bush says in the video]. It's as if the president were onstage with the band. "Right now the days seem awfully dark to those affected, but I'm confident that with time, you'll get your lives back in order."

Is it possible that Karmagrrrl is empathizing with Mr. Bush? Is it possible that this is a romantic video about America in mourning? A few images undo that suggestion. At a certain point in the video, you don't just see families waving for help, infants crying in their mother's arms and children in makeshift carts. You see women shouting obscenities at the camera.

Unlike the original Green Day video, which could be either pro-war or antiwar, this one sends a clear message. Yet what makes the Katrina video work is that it isn't totally obvious from the beginning.

It glides to an end with a long panorama of homeless people sitting on curbs and waiting for help. The song goes, "Wake me up when September ends,/ Wake me up when September ends,/ Wake me up when September ends." Rather gratuitously, after the music has stopped, the president's mother, speaking from Houston, gets the last gaffe: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, and this is working very well for them." And it's a wrap.

By the way, Karmagrrrl is not alone. Around the same time she was joining Green Day's song to images of Katrina, two Houston rappers who collectively call themselves the Legendary K.O., Damien Randle and Micah Nickerson (who lives near the Houston Astrodome), made their own mash-up. They joined Kanye West's hit song "Gold Digger" with some of the ad-lib remarks that Mr. West made during an NBC telethon for hurricane relief, tossed in some more words, called it "George Bush Doesn't Like Black People" and posted it on the Internet.

It's now a hit on the radio and the Internet, and can be downloaded from various Web sites, including the rappers' own, www.k-otix.com, [and Ourmedia.org].

LA's Zadi is a friend and a member of the Meetthevloggers group I work with, so, congrats Zadi!

'Mash-ups in the Middle': Fair use in the digital age

Pretty interesting discussion last night at UC Berkeley in a panel discussion on Discovering the New Legal Landscape for Digital Media with Denise Howell, Hank Barry and Pamela Samuelson.

For the occasion, I created an 11-minute video about an interesting phenomenon we're seeing at Ourmedia: a couple of dozen mash-ups (out of 45,000 works uploaded) that push the edge of the fair use envelope.

Today is the six-month anniversary of Ourmedia's launch, and we've been wrestling with this since day one. We tell people they can upload works they're legally entitled to upload (plus, no porn), but we have no way of determining where the line of fair use is drawn. Instead, we point people to the fair use guidelines drawn up by Fenwick-West and let our members determine the parameters of fair use for digital works.

The video was among the highlights of the evening, several attendees told me afterward. Before she left, Pam Samuelson said that fair use today means being able to back up your CD or DVD. I respectfully disagreed, saying that the public has a much broader view of what they believe they should be allowed to do with digital media. (See the video for a few somewhat expansive views of fair use.)

Hank Barry, the former CEO of Napster who is among those being sued by the entertainment industry, always has some provocative things to say, and last night was no different. He said the current situation between the entertainment industry (and their allies on Capitol Hill) vs. the Digital Generation (my term for the wired public) amounts to "a Mexican standoff." Which I think is true -- I said it may take 10 years or more before the kids using digital technologies today assume positions of power in government and corporate America.

Some other highlights from the evening:

Denise about the impact of the Grokster decision on startups: "You have to be clear within your company that if your product is capable of infringing uses, the noninfringing uses is what the product is all about."

More Denise: "If you're a nonprofit like Ourmedia and not in it for the bucks, that's going to weigh in the analysis. I don't know if it'll carry the day, but it will and should be a factor." … "Some of the [case] law will be made by companies with big targets on their backs, like Google, because of their fair use business models."

Hank: "I think you have to have a secret room where you go to talk about this stuff." (Laughter.) "You can't define infringement for a client in advance when you've got a technology and you don't know how it's gonna be used. The best inventions result in tools that are surprising for the most part."

Of the courts' predilection for filtering technologies to remove copyrighted works from servers, Hank said: "I'm here to tell you, it doesn't work. We spent $10 million developing a filtering system. It didn't work then, and it ain't working now."

Hank suggested that one of the things he learned during his time at Napster was that "people east of Denver" see the culture very differently than we do out here.

I disagree to some extent -- the divide I see is largely based on generational fault lines, and lines of power (those with power are more likely to acquiesce to the wishes of the entertainment media powers).

The panel discussion will be podcast at a later date by IT Conversations.

In any event, regardless of where you come down on the issue of fair use in the digital age, I think you'll find this video fascinating. (Ourmedia page | play video)

Beastie Boys offer a cappella remixes

Cable TV channel G4's "Attack of the Show" (which I'll be appearing on Friday) had an interesting segment today about the Beastie Boys' website, which is now allowing people to remix 11 of the Beasties' a cappella songs as long as it's for personal use. And, as a result, "Attack of the Show" couldn't show the remix that they created.

"Lawyers!" cried Chris, one of the show's hosts. "Go and chop it up," said Kevin, the co-host.

Windows got ya down? Try a remix

Wired News: Pirated copies of Microsoft's operating system have existed as long as chintzy PC owners themselves. But now pirates are doing more than just cracking Windows -- they claim to be improving it.

After all these years since the last release of Windows, that's not too hard to believe.

Magnatune Contest underway at CC Mixter

Creative Commons' music remix site, CC Mixter, is currently featuring its second contest this year. People are free to remix samples from any of Magnatune's hundreds of artists. Magnatune is a net record label that releases all music under Creative Commons licenses and the winner of this contest will get his or her own Magnatune recording contract. The final entry deadline is July 31.

'How we fell in love' remix

Derek K. Miller, Vancouver-based Writer, Editor, Web Guy, Drummer and Dad, put together a little ditty by sampling the "how we fell in love" podcast by Gnomedex organizers Chris Pirillo and Latthanapon "Ponzi" Indharasophang and setting it to music. Not bad. And it's freely shareable under the Creative Commons Music Sharing license.

Wired mag on remix culture

From Wired magazine's July issue:

Remix Now! The rise of cut & paste culture (not online yet)

God's Little Toys: Confessions of a cut & paste artist. By William Gibson

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines (Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the JarJar-less Phantom Edit (sound of an audience voting with its fingers), brand-hybrid athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo jumping, and products like Kubrick figures, those Japanese collectibles that slyly masquerade as soulless corporate units yet are rescued from anonymity by the application of a thoughtfully aggressive "custom" paint job.

QT: King of Thieves. Scene-stealing, Quentin Tarantino-style.

Rights remixed

Mike Walsh at The Fourth Estate blog:

As they say – no new tunes in the key of C. But in an age of Tarantino, hip hop sampling and Google API mashups – the remix is generally better than the real thing. What should be a headache for intellectual property lawyers, is becoming fertile ground for legal innovation with the rise of the creative commons licensing regime. But does copyright altruism really add up to new economy affluence? ...

The new remix culture is not just about clever marketing, it is about giving consumers the tools to participate in the media experience.

Ourmedia empowers content producers

EContent Magazine: One for All and All for One: Ourmedia.org Empowers Content Producers. Excerpt:

He says the idea [for Ourmedia] was spawned partly by research he did for his recently published book about the personal media revolution, called Darknet. Lasica says he felt dissatisfaction when he talked to people about distributing personal content. "After I did all this research I just sensed how frustrated people were by copyright laws written for 19th or 20th century technology that really don't take into consideration the advances made in the digital age. How are we going to enable the remix revolution, for example, and all of this other stuff hidden away in the dark, hidden recesses of the Internet, the Darknet, that should be brought out into the open and celebrated? Ourmedia is what evolved out of it," Lasica explains.