Who Says Remixing Isn't Creative Or New?

from the or-copyright-infringement... dept

There's been a bunch of buzz this week about a new "album" created by an Israeli musician, Kutiman, who took videos on YouTube of people playing different instruments, and mixed them together to create a series of songs (tragically, it looks like all the attention has brought down the site right now). The end result is incredible. The music is really good, even if it's based off of a mix of high and low quality clips that no one ever would have put together otherwise. Whenever we talk about the power of "mashups" or "remixed" content, there's always someone who complains that it doesn't count, and it's not really creative or new because the remixer "didn't create anything." However, I don't see how anyone can listen to the songs created here and say that Kutiman didn't create something new and amazing. But, of course, as reader Johnjac notes, in theory, those whose videos were used on this album certainly could claim copyright infringement (in the credits, you can see all the "original" videos), and perhaps they might. But it's difficult to take seriously any copyright law that says that creating music in this manner is illegal.

Filed Under: copyright, kutiman, mashups, remixing, videos
Companies: google, youtube