Safe As Milk

GreyTuesday.org

Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil
disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse’s Grey
Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI’s
attempts to censor this work.

Get it here.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album
and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album.
Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella
version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes
like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major
media outlets like Rolling Stone (”an ingenious hip-hop
record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston
Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album
of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding
that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites
remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of
the Beatles 1968 White Album.

Danger Mouse’s album is one of the most “respectful” and
undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the
Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI
have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest
in the artistic significance of this work. And without a
clearly defined right to sample (e.g. compulsory licensing),
the five major record labels will continue to use copyright
in a reactionary and narrowly self-interested manner that
limits and erodes creativity. Their actions are also
self-defeating: good new music is being created that people
want to buy, but the major labels are so obsessed with
hoarding their copyrights that they are literally turning
customers away.

This first-of-its-kind protest signals a refusal to let
major label lawyers control what musicians can create and
what the public can hear. The Grey Album is only one of
the thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that
have been stifled by the record industry– not to mention
the ones that were never even attempted because of the
current legal climate. We cannot allow these corporations
to continue censoring art; we need common-sense reforms
to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical
for artists.