Trent Ponders Music’s Downward Spiral
Posted by James | Filed under Geek, Music, Play
To be perfectly honest, if you asked me where to find a thoughtful commentary on DMCA and musician’s digital intellectual property rights, the last place that would spring to mind would be Trent Reznor’s blog at nin.com.
However, that’s exactly what you’ll find, right now, if you head over there. Trent describes an ongoing project he’s had with re-mixing communities on the Internet, where he released the master recording files on the band’s website in an experiment to see what could come of it.
The results have been very pleasing to Trent, and he found what independent artists have known for years now: if you’re hard up for a sequel album, release your recording masters to talented amateur DJ’s, and bam, you’ve got a follow up album with a unique but familiar sound.
He liked it so much that he wanted create an officially sanctioned community around the remixing of NIN music, but ran into a fair amount of opposition from his record label. You may have heard of these guys: Universal.
They’re currently involved in lawsuits against Google and News Corp alleging that they’ve built businesses around exploiting the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, and that by setting up a user-generated content community for NIN, they’d be culpable for that same type of action.
That doesn’t man they don’t think it’s a great idea, though. They encouraged Reznor to move ahead with the project, but under the NIN brand, and ensured that should any DMCA allegations be brought against Universal, they would disavow all knowledge of the topic, and say that the band itself is culpable for the community violations.
Understandably, Reznor is a bit hesitant to launch it under his own name, and while he doesn’t specifically ask for legal advice, reading between the lines of his post, it seems that he might be open to a clever scheme that would prevent the pants from being sued off him.
Tags: copyright, dmca, legal, Music, nin, Privacy, trent reznor
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
