Video comparison

Mad­sen, daily provider of bril­liant online music and video stuff, has made a com­par­i­son of Elastica’s ‘Wak­ing Up’ and and The Stran­glers ‘No more heroes’; Elas­tica — “Waking Up” (Live 1995).

I won’t go into the argu­ment (he’s right), just note three or four things:

Elas­tica is great. The Stran­glers are great. And Mad­sen is great for remind­ing me.

And: YouTube is pretty damn great as well. These videos are prob­a­bly copy­righted and what have we. But when the copy­right hold­ers can’t fig­ure out a way to allow for com­men­tary and remix­ing them­selves, the pub­lic takes over. Stuff that you couldn’t get your hands on before now shows up, get picked up by blogs and por­tals for everybody’s view­ing plea­sure. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if a 10-minute clip from, say, Con­voy caused a rise in DVD sales.

Guys, you’ve tried so hard to become a part of our lives, of our cul­tural his­tory while tak­ing our cash. Which is fair. Now, just let us treat your mate­r­ial the way we want to: As a part of our own his­tory with the right to play, quote, refer etc. in what­ever form tech­nol­ogy allows us to.

(I know, nobody prob­a­bly want to sue any­one for the two clips men­tioned, but it’s the principle…)