Artists like Mashups but Lawyers don't

I enjoyed meeting Derek Powazek at SXSW. I heard him tell the story of how he met his wife on the Bloggers in Love panel, and then heard an extended remix version at Fray Cafe.

Derek writes aboout The Future of Darknets panel at SXSW,in Just a Thought: SXSW to MPAA: STFU:

"There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to 'protect artists' but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

After all, when we allow these industry groups to frame the debate about the internet and file trading as artists versus pirates, it's a false dichotomy. No one in that angry audience in Austin wants to dupe a movie to sell it on the street. That's piracy. We just want to put movies on our hard drives and iPods, share our mix CDs with each other (just like we used to do with tapes), and mash that funny video with that cool song to produce something new, something we'll give away for free."

I hope that the MPAA comes up with a way to allow artists to use portions of movies and TV shows in our work.

How about taking a look at Creative Commons? You still get to keep your copyright.