A Lot More on Remix Culture

clipped from journals.aol.com In my non-expert opinion, the idea behind remixing other people’s content isn’t really plagiarism, since in most cases, you’re building on another person’s work, while crediting the source material, whether you’re calling it homage, or sampling, or something else. A famous example of a mashup album is the Grey Album, which was a mashup of rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album with the Beatles’s White Album. It got pretty popular, until EMI, the record label that owns the rights to the White Album, issued a cease-and-desist order (though if you look around on the Web, you can probably still find it). Anyway, making your stuff available for other people is as big a part of remix culture as using it — take a look at the Creative Commons license, which is offering an alternative view of copyright, with an eye towards allowing others to build upon what an artist has done. It’s the difference between “some rights reserved” and “all rights reserved.”