From grey to the dark ages

Ok, everyone’s heard of the Grey Album by DJ Dan­ger­Mouse by now (which now is a point in itself). Usu­ally I would have posted some­thing about stuff like this as I find these thing incred­i­bly impor­tant, but I’ve been busy and think­ing a bit about what I want with this weblog. So I sort of con­cluded that I couldn’t really add some­thing to the debate, con­sid­ered going grey just for the fun of it, but didn’t even find the time to do that.

But. It appears men­tion­ing what is going on out there on the dan­ger­ous inter­net is some­thing any­way. See, this is get­ting waaay out of hand. You don’t find remixes of stuff you own the rights to amus­ing? Ok, I can see where you’re going. This is the usual stuff. You won’t add any­thing apart from bul­ly­ing to the debate, even though the copy­right laws obvi­ously don’t take the net­worked struc­ture and capa­bil­i­ties of the net into account? Ok, this isn’t exactly news either; the most of us don’t take you seri­ously any­more for that very rea­son. But threat­en­ing peo­ple link­ing to a highly inter­est­ing debate in a civ­i­lized world in the 21st cen­tury? Come on, you can do bet­ter than that. And even if you don’t get the net at all (which more than likely will reflect on the value of your poor com­pa­nies in a year or two), please behave your­selves anyway.

No, I don’t want to encour­age peo­ple to sam­ple any­thing they come across, but don’t you see what is going on here? The world is chang­ing, guys. And while you sit on your asses, afraid that you haven’t got what it takes to make it in the new world, you take on the aggre­sive atti­tude, think­ing that if you just scare peo­ple enough, the demand for inter­est­ing con­tent, eas­ier dis­tri­b­u­tion, the pos­si­bil­ity to (legally) link to inter­est­ing stuff etc. will go away? Dream on.

Any­way, stuff is going on:

• Keld Bach got one of the famous let­ters just for link­ing. Fol­low the devel­op­ment as he’s refus­ing to sign a nice piece of paper stat­ing he’s a criminal.
• Check in on Grey Tues­day and Down­hill­Bat­tle for more news.
• Dan­ish online papers Flix, Infor­ma­tion and Poli­tiken has more on the story.
• Cre­ative Com­mons is evil. You see, they actu­ally try to pro­vide more up-to-date rights mange­ment. And that we really can’t have. (by the way: Type­pad / Mov­able­Type offers ‘auto­matic’ CC licenses — so now all their users have to look out?)
• Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion is evil too.
• Dalager, Føhns, Erlando, Web­mer­cial, Myg­dal, Rock­land, Per­spec­tif , Hele­nius, Coffa, Classy and K9k are blogging…
• …closely moni­tired by AntiPi­rat­Grup­pen I presume.

Dis­claimers? Huh? No, you see — this is a weblog meant for adult peo­ple with minds of their own…