If you bother to think about it, I would guess that most in these precincts would find it objectionable for a record label to take away a musician’s control over what is released under their name by re-editing, re-mixing, choosing different takes, etc? So maybe it would be useful to know the distinctions you will allow as true between that situation and one where a person completely unknown to the musician takes the release and subjects it to anything they like including (for example) subversion or perversion? Believe it or not, there are people out here with moral values (often spiritually-derived) who might not agree with you that there is a difference — perhaps Woody Allen or Scorcese, who testified to Congress about third-party colorizing of films.

Presumably even Techdirt, whatever it may be, would find it somehow objectionable if its proudly reusable works were to share space with incitements to commit child abuse, stringing up politicians (however popular the sentiment would be here in the peanut gallery) or mass destruction on some unhinged blog somewhere. Roy Orbison’s estate sued so his song “Pretty Woman” wouldn’t be associated with 2 Live Crew’s, er, interpretation of it (which it is — “pretty woman orbison” in Google returns the Wikipedia article in first place, and “pretty woman song” has the WP link as the first non-video one) — I may celebrate the resulting fair use doctrine but I don’t belittle the estate for caring or say they must be making some insane distinction that I cannot for the life of me fathom. There’s a point where “I don’t understand how X can believe Y” stops being merely rhetorical and starts evidencing your own lack of capacity, bad faith, or both.

hey mate, nah mash-ups don’t usually infringe moral rights. Actually moral rights have nothing to do with morality (that’s just how they’ve been translated from the French ‘droit morale’). actually they are about protecting the personality of the author. BUT most jurisdictions (and the berne convention sets this as the relevant standard) require that the modified work actually prejudice the author’s reputation or honour. This is a pretty high standard and is objective not subjective. It depends where you are but I’d imagine the US is somewhat similar to Australia in their application of moral rights if they acknowledged a claim. Anyway, my point is that mash-ups don’t usually infringe moral rights because they don’t usually objectively damage an author’s reputation. Anyway, in Australia there is a defence that allows derogatory treatment so long as it was reasonable considering the purpose of the treatment of the original work. Say if a mash-up was made as a parody (which is rarely the case as most mash-up artists commemorate the author by sampling them), then the derogatory treatment could be reasonable because it was for the purpose of making a parody.

So there you go, the author’s moral rights are to protect his reputation and personality contained within his work. The best argument against this random is that he doesn’t understand moral rights and mash-up music does not undermine an author’s moral rights.

There you go, hope that enlightens everyone. Otherwise, I fully agree with your article, I hate snobby people that try to make intelligent arguments using big words for why not to allow mash-up music. The worst is when those people who think they are cultured (very uncultured if you ask me) don’t know the meanings of those words and assume everyone in the game going for the mash-up team is too stupid to outsmart them. ugh. If they don’t like the art form then just say so, don’t try to make ‘smart’ arguments that are inherently stupid to justify their hate for it.