Artists!

The US Congress is about to pass an internet censorship bill written by the copyright and corporate music and film lobbies, claiming that this bill is written in your name to “protect creativity.” The law would allow the government or corporations to censor entire sites — they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

In fact, PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are backed and largely written by the Hollywood film industry, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is trying to sell goods and ideas that are already free. Continue reading

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Support this project. Parts 2 & 3 after the break. Continue reading

Musopen is a non-profit library of copyright free music. This project will use your donations to purchase and release music to the public domain. Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn’t be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.

This isn’t just a crazy idea: we’ve done this before using donations from our website, but now we want to tackle something much more ambitious. Continue reading

RiP: A Remix Manifesto (Filmmakers in attendance for Q&A) :: June 19-30, 2009; 10:00 pm :: 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, New York, NY (Tickets).

In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. Continue reading

FUTURE OF MUSIC COALITION presents D.C. Policy Day 2009 at National Geographic Music and Radio and National Geographic Live! :: February 11, 2009.

This daylong event brings together leading voices to debate how changes in the policymaking landscape could impact the music community. Scheduled just two weeks after the start of a new federal administration, the event brings laser-beam focus to the core issues emerging in the courts, in Congress, at the FCC and the Copyright Office. With three panels, two keynote speeches and a special conversation, Policy Day 2009 will provide musicians, technologists, legal experts, policymakers and advocates with the opportunity to participate in robust but balanced discussions about how media and broadband policy affect the music industry, and how changes in copyright law could impact the music and tech communities. Continue reading

[Image: Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, ca. 1941] Song of Solomon — by Ralph Borland and Julian Jonker — is an aleatoric audio collage and 8-channel installation that samples many versions of Mbube, aka Wimoweh aka The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in a sonic tribute to the song’s dead author Solomon Linda. By fragmenting and reordering compositional fragments of this ’song of songs’, the installation questions the assumptions about compositional innovation and imitation that inform Western intellectual property law. In this jungle of sounds, the dead Author rests.