I wrote earlier this week about EMI’s legal attack on Hi5, and the advertising value its subsidiary Virgin Records got from the Daft Hands meme (which was exactly the kind of material EMI objected to Hi5 serving).

I’ve been listening to the new album from mashup artist Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) a lot over the past couple of days and it brings up some issues in the same vein.

2006′s “Night Ripper” (torrent | complete list of samples) launched him into Pitchfork shininess, and the critical acclaim is well deserved. To give you an idea, here’s “Hold Up”, in which the samples range from Ludacris and 50 Cent to Weezer and the Pixies (NSFW):

(more…)

Last week EMI filed a lawsuit against the social network hi5 for allowing its users to upload videos with unlicensed music on their audio tracks. EMI alleges that hi5

“allowed infringement to go unchecked, content to profit handsomely from advertisements that appear side-by-side with infringing content, and from the draw created by their dissemination of [EMI's] copyrighted works.” (from the lawsuit)

OK. It’s understandable that EMI wants some control over how its content is used, who profits from it, and how much they pay for the right to do so. But this music-industry-has-hopelessly-oldschool-economic-model thing is becoming a tiresome truism. EMI is not going to be able to make money from teenagers using EMI songs in their homemade videos. EMI wishes it could. But that doesn’t mean the solution to the situation is to try to stop teenagers from using EMI songs in their homemade videos.

(more…)