Gordon Brown says 'Mashups are the future'

In his big annual speech today, Gordon Brown, the UK chancellor, said that he wants to spend lots of money catching music and film pirates (who, in the UK, can't be penalised if they sell DVDs with hand-written labels. Only people who photocopy the covers can get in trouble). However, he also said that he wants to make it easier to produce 'transformative works' - i.e. bootlegs and mashups, like the Gray Album, The Avalanches original Gimix, A Night at the Hip-Hopera, and my personal highbrow favourite Glassbreaks. The Times says: "The report suggests that exemptions to copyright law should be allowed for “transformative works”. This would permit the use of copyright material in new and creative ways, so long as it did not detract from the value of that material or offend artistic integrity. It calls on the EU to amend the law to allow for that exception. It would allow “rappers” and other creators to rework old material." (These ideas come from the ~~Gower Report~~ Gowers Review, which Gordon seems to be endorsing)

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

That's "Gowers Review", matey.

But good news all round. Great headline too.

regards

Fact Checkin' Cuz.

# posted by

Anonymous : 3:03 pm

Mashups, wow, too bad they're pretty much over. Most are insulting to the original artist and poorly produced.

Atrists can incorporate whatever imagery they want in paintings and prints. Why not musicians?

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:37 pm

How can this possibly work? With the internet and all spanning the globe. its ok to make derivative works in UK and not in US?

So an artist would bring their laptop to UK, jack in and upload the mp3 to the web in order to avoid prosecision in US?

Just sounds like total non-sense.

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:03 pm

I was interested to hear recently about Ian McEwan, the author, who incorporated bits of someone else's book into one of his most successful ones - effectively "sampling" the other book. Authors are leaping to his defence, including, notably, J.D. Salinger; they are saying that the most creative old skool writers - Shakespeare etc - used "book sampling" to great effect. Sound familiar?

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:08 pm

This sounds way too sensible. Surely it couldn't actually happen?

# posted by

Anonymous : 10:00 pm

I remember when mashups were called medleys and were strictly the domain of washed up lounge singers in Las Vegas.

the world is changing in a bad way.

:(

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:56 am

How about learning to play an instrument and writing original songs?
Now THAT would be the future of music.

# posted by

Anonymous : 5:03 pm

Thats why I just let people download my tunes, cuz I could never pay for all the damn sample clearence. They can't sue me if I don't make any money..can they? Take away our samples and you take away what makes most hip hop and some electronic music what it is. And yes I can play an instrument and write origional tunes, but dammit I like sampling as well!

# posted by

Anonymous : 7:13 pm

If Gordon Brown & EMI are down with it, how could mashups be LESS hip? I guess they'll be revived "ironically" sometime around July.

# posted by

Anonymous : 12:58 am