Illegal Art

Here’s a link to mp3’s of DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. He remixed Jay Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album to make one kickass record. But the record companies want this album to go away. There are only 3000 physical copies out there and EMI has asked the stores distributing them to destroy them.

Copyright law really sucks in this case. It’s more about the record companies and money than it is about the protection of artists. What are we missing that would set the world on fire creatively as a result?

Copyright law in Canada is a little different. You can read about it right here. The Act contains a special exception for “private copying”: it permits the copying of music files “onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy”, but does not permit copying for the purpose of “distributing” or “communicating to the public by telecommunication”.

So uploading ‘bad’. Downloading? Kind of grey…

Check out Electronic Frontier Canada, a Canadian group pushing for the legalization of file sharing on the web.